Viva Yiddish! Project is a glimpse at vintage L.A. music

The Viva Yiddish! Project is a look backward and forward into L.A.'s polyglot musical heritage. In decades past, neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights had significant populations of Yiddish speakers whose uptempo klezmer tunes made unlikely but easy bedfellows with the pachuco and mambo of their Latino neighbors. Though L.A.'s neighborhoods are more broken up today, this dozens-strong ensemble -- founded by Frank London of the Klezmatics, Yiddish music scholar Michael Alpert and USC professor and music writer Josh Kun -- is a fond remembrance of the era, a thoroughly contemporary example of the possibilities of localized world music, and most important, a giant, giddy dance party. They play at 8 p.m. on Saturday at California Plaza.

-August Brown

Photo: Courtesy of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles

After two postponements due to “technical demands,” the curtain finally rose Tuesday night on previews for “9 to 5: The Musical,” where audience members received an unexpected treat — a mini-concert by Dolly Parton.

Parton, of course, penned the music and lyrics for the original 1980 hit film as well as the new musical, now in its pre-Broadway run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The country singer made a surprise appearance, talking up the show beforehand and warning that the performance might stop a few times, as is typical during previews for complicated productions.

“9 to 5” went on as planned until nearly the end of Act 1, when, sure enough, things suddenly ground to a halt. Parton, who was seated in the orchestra section, immediately leaped into action, according to those in attendance. Standing in front of the stage, she chatted up the audience and took questions. She then led them in a rousing sing-along to the show’s theme song, “9 to 5.”

With technical issues still being worked out, Parton went on to sing another of her famous compositions, “I Will Always Love You,” quipping that “Whitney Houston may have sung the song better, but I made more money on it.” The crowd went wild.

The world premiere musical, which features Allison Janney (in the role originated by Lily Tomlin), Megan Hilty (Dolly Parton), Stephanie J. Block (Jane Fonda) and Marc Kudisch (Dabney Coleman), officially opens Sept. 20.

— Lisa Fung

Photo: Dolly Parton at a news conference in New York this summer. Credit: Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images

After two postponements due to “technical demands,” the curtain finally rose Tuesday night on previews for “9 to 5: The Musical,” where audience members received an unexpected treat — a mini-concert by Dolly Parton.

Parton, of course, penned the music and lyrics for the original 1980 hit film as well as the new musical, now in its pre-Broadway run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The country singer made a surprise appearance, talking up the show beforehand and warning that the performance might stop a few times, as is typical during previews for complicated productions.

“9 to 5” went on as planned until nearly the end of Act 1, when, sure enough, things suddenly ground to a halt. Parton, who was seated in the orchestra section, immediately leaped into action, according to those in attendance. Standing in front of the stage, she chatted up the audience and took questions. She then led them in a rousing sing-along to the show’s theme song, “9 to 5.”

With technical issues still being worked out, Parton went on to sing another of her famous compositions, “I Will Always Love You,” quipping that “Whitney Houston may have sung the song better, but I made more money on it.” The crowd went wild.

The world premiere musical, which features Allison Janney (in the role originated by Lily Tomlin), Megan Hilty (Dolly Parton), Stephanie J. Block (Jane Fonda) and Marc Kudisch (Dabney Coleman), officially opens Sept. 20.

— Lisa Fung

Photo: Dolly Parton at a news conference in New York this summer. Credit: Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images

Nike's Human Race event drew well over 12,000 red-shirt clad runners to the L.A. Coliseum last Saturday, even a running Elvis. It was the last leg of Nike's ambitious fund-raising event, which made the most of new technologies in running (participants were given a computer chip that logged their miles, contributing to a global mileage meter for the event) and music (certain Nike running shoes, for instance, can sync to an iPod or other devices).

The 6.2-mile race had already hit several countries around the globe, including Germany and Japan, with proceeds going to environmental organizations and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.  Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave some opening comments, as did Councilman Bernard Parks, as runners stretched and warmed up.

The runners were there to compete, but there was no doubt that the closing performance by Kanye West, Mr. Nike Air Yeezy himself, was on everyone's mind. It was one of the benefits of finishing the race, which went up Figueroa Street with turns at Adams Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard, as fast as possible, though many participants played their own personal soundtracks on earbuds or enjoyed the entertainment provided en route -- dance and music, including Chinese lion dances, Brazilian capoeira dancers, Japanese taiko drummers and Mexican mariachis.

So, I'm in the elevator at Southern California's food porn capitol -- the two-story Whole Foods on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena -- when my eye strays to one of those earth-toned signs advertising a cooking class/singles event. Imagine my surprise when the name Maynard James Keenan jumps out at me! Along with the phrase "wine tasting"!

Actually, the surprise was minimal. The multi-tasking prog rock master from Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer has been doing the grocery-store circuit for a while, offering autographs and sips from the bins of his Arizona vineyards. He hit his first Whole Foods back in April. (Idolator blogger Dan Gibson spotted that event while shopping for overpriced lettuce in Arizona; Keenan can keep his PR budget down for these events, since music scribes apparently love to shop Earthbound Farm-fancy.)

The current wine tour has Keenan and his partner, Eric Glomski, sampling from the first vintages of Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, a new business uniting the two winemakers on the refreshed ground of an old vineyard near Willcox, Ariz.

If you haven't yet seen "Hamlet 2," the joyfully ridiculous comedy centered on Dana Marschz, a high-school drama teacher short on talent but overstocked with ambitions, the time is nigh. With the summer season officially over and "real life" back in full swing, we need a humbling reminder that our most precious of pursuits -- for Steve Coogan's Marschz, it's acting! in the most James Lipton sense of the word -- can often be undone by what we lack (talent, good sense) and elevated by the teamwork of several wastoid Tucson teens (or whatever strange details apply to your own life). The overarching life lesson is to enjoy it all, though life lessons are exactly the kind of earnest fluff that gets torn to pieces in "Hamlet 2," but in a giddy, sly John Waters way.

At the center of "Hamlet 2," the movie and the musical inside the movie, is "Rock Me Sexy Jesus," a middle finger of sorts to the high-school board that canceled drama. It involves Jesus in a tank top and jeans, strutting his "swimmer's bod" to the squealing admiration of a coterie of girls and bi-curious guys. You can watch a little bit of it above.

We talked with music supervisor Ralph Sall, who wrote the music for "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" and other songs from "Hamlet 2," such as the inimitable "You're as Gay as the Day Is Long." His background includes producing for Paul McCartney, Jane's Addiction and the Ramones; and writing tracks for musicians as diverse as Liz Phair and George Clinton.

So, writing "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" was just another day in the life -- almost. If you don't count that gospel choir that was hanging around...

Las Vegas' MAGIC Marketplace, a long-running fashion trade show, features every style and brand of clothing you could imagine, but the real fun is in the streetwear area. You get live music and the chance to snap shots of rappers who are either pushing their own clothing brands or helping a friend. Also, this being Vegas, MAGIC remains the place to see and be seen.

 

Brooklyn rapper Sean Price (pictured, left), a favorite of rap-loving internet heads, was on hand pushing clothing brand Society Original.

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Dolly Parton gives us a sneak peek at '9 to 5: The Musical'

After two postponements due to “technical demands,” the curtain finally rose Tuesday night on previews for “9 to 5: The Musical,” where audience members received an unexpected treat — a mini-concert by Dolly Parton.

Parton, of course, penned the music and lyrics for the original 1980 hit film as well as the new musical, now in its pre-Broadway run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The country singer made a surprise appearance, talking up the show beforehand and warning that the performance might stop a few times, as is typical during previews for complicated productions.

“9 to 5” went on as planned until nearly the end of Act 1, when, sure enough, things suddenly ground to a halt. Parton, who was seated in the orchestra section, immediately leaped into action, according to those in attendance. Standing in front of the stage, she chatted up the audience and took questions. She then led them in a rousing sing-along to the show’s theme song, “9 to 5.”

With technical issues still being worked out, Parton went on to sing another of her famous compositions, “I Will Always Love You,” quipping that “Whitney Houston may have sung the song better, but I made more money on it.” The crowd went wild.

The world premiere musical, which features Allison Janney (in the role originated by Lily Tomlin), Megan Hilty (Dolly Parton), Stephanie J. Block (Jane Fonda) and Marc Kudisch (Dabney Coleman), officially opens Sept. 20.

— Lisa Fung

Photo: Dolly Parton at a news conference in New York this summer. Credit: Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images

After two postponements due to “technical demands,” the curtain finally rose Tuesday night on previews for “9 to 5: The Musical,” where audience members received an unexpected treat — a mini-concert by Dolly Parton.

Parton, of course, penned the music and lyrics for the original 1980 hit film as well as the new musical, now in its pre-Broadway run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The country singer made a surprise appearance, talking up the show beforehand and warning that the performance might stop a few times, as is typical during previews for complicated productions.

“9 to 5” went on as planned until nearly the end of Act 1, when, sure enough, things suddenly ground to a halt. Parton, who was seated in the orchestra section, immediately leaped into action, according to those in attendance. Standing in front of the stage, she chatted up the audience and took questions. She then led them in a rousing sing-along to the show’s theme song, “9 to 5.”

With technical issues still being worked out, Parton went on to sing another of her famous compositions, “I Will Always Love You,” quipping that “Whitney Houston may have sung the song better, but I made more money on it.” The crowd went wild.

The world premiere musical, which features Allison Janney (in the role originated by Lily Tomlin), Megan Hilty (Dolly Parton), Stephanie J. Block (Jane Fonda) and Marc Kudisch (Dabney Coleman), officially opens Sept. 20.

— Lisa Fung

Photo: Dolly Parton at a news conference in New York this summer. Credit: Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images

Nike's Human Race event drew well over 12,000 red-shirt clad runners to the L.A. Coliseum last Saturday, even a running Elvis. It was the last leg of Nike's ambitious fund-raising event, which made the most of new technologies in running (participants were given a computer chip that logged their miles, contributing to a global mileage meter for the event) and music (certain Nike running shoes, for instance, can sync to an iPod or other devices).

The 6.2-mile race had already hit several countries around the globe, including Germany and Japan, with proceeds going to environmental organizations and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.  Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave some opening comments, as did Councilman Bernard Parks, as runners stretched and warmed up.

The runners were there to compete, but there was no doubt that the closing performance by Kanye West, Mr. Nike Air Yeezy himself, was on everyone's mind. It was one of the benefits of finishing the race, which went up Figueroa Street with turns at Adams Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard, as fast as possible, though many participants played their own personal soundtracks on earbuds or enjoyed the entertainment provided en route -- dance and music, including Chinese lion dances, Brazilian capoeira dancers, Japanese taiko drummers and Mexican mariachis.

So, I'm in the elevator at Southern California's food porn capitol -- the two-story Whole Foods on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena -- when my eye strays to one of those earth-toned signs advertising a cooking class/singles event. Imagine my surprise when the name Maynard James Keenan jumps out at me! Along with the phrase "wine tasting"!

Actually, the surprise was minimal. The multi-tasking prog rock master from Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer has been doing the grocery-store circuit for a while, offering autographs and sips from the bins of his Arizona vineyards. He hit his first Whole Foods back in April. (Idolator blogger Dan Gibson spotted that event while shopping for overpriced lettuce in Arizona; Keenan can keep his PR budget down for these events, since music scribes apparently love to shop Earthbound Farm-fancy.)

The current wine tour has Keenan and his partner, Eric Glomski, sampling from the first vintages of Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, a new business uniting the two winemakers on the refreshed ground of an old vineyard near Willcox, Ariz.

If you haven't yet seen "Hamlet 2," the joyfully ridiculous comedy centered on Dana Marschz, a high-school drama teacher short on talent but overstocked with ambitions, the time is nigh. With the summer season officially over and "real life" back in full swing, we need a humbling reminder that our most precious of pursuits -- for Steve Coogan's Marschz, it's acting! in the most James Lipton sense of the word -- can often be undone by what we lack (talent, good sense) and elevated by the teamwork of several wastoid Tucson teens (or whatever strange details apply to your own life). The overarching life lesson is to enjoy it all, though life lessons are exactly the kind of earnest fluff that gets torn to pieces in "Hamlet 2," but in a giddy, sly John Waters way.

At the center of "Hamlet 2," the movie and the musical inside the movie, is "Rock Me Sexy Jesus," a middle finger of sorts to the high-school board that canceled drama. It involves Jesus in a tank top and jeans, strutting his "swimmer's bod" to the squealing admiration of a coterie of girls and bi-curious guys. You can watch a little bit of it above.

We talked with music supervisor Ralph Sall, who wrote the music for "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" and other songs from "Hamlet 2," such as the inimitable "You're as Gay as the Day Is Long." His background includes producing for Paul McCartney, Jane's Addiction and the Ramones; and writing tracks for musicians as diverse as Liz Phair and George Clinton.

So, writing "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" was just another day in the life -- almost. If you don't count that gospel choir that was hanging around...

Las Vegas' MAGIC Marketplace, a long-running fashion trade show, features every style and brand of clothing you could imagine, but the real fun is in the streetwear area. You get live music and the chance to snap shots of rappers who are either pushing their own clothing brands or helping a friend. Also, this being Vegas, MAGIC remains the place to see and be seen.

 

Brooklyn rapper Sean Price (pictured, left), a favorite of rap-loving internet heads, was on hand pushing clothing brand Society Original.

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Watching Kanye and chatting with Common at the Nike Human Race

Nike's Human Race event drew well over 12,000 red-shirt clad runners to the L.A. Coliseum last Saturday, even a running Elvis. It was the last leg of Nike's ambitious fund-raising event, which made the most of new technologies in running (participants were given a computer chip that logged their miles, contributing to a global mileage meter for the event) and music (certain Nike running shoes, for instance, can sync to an iPod or other devices).

The 6.2-mile race had already hit several countries around the globe, including Germany and Japan, with proceeds going to environmental organizations and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.  Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave some opening comments, as did Councilman Bernard Parks, as runners stretched and warmed up.

The runners were there to compete, but there was no doubt that the closing performance by Kanye West, Mr. Nike Air Yeezy himself, was on everyone's mind. It was one of the benefits of finishing the race, which went up Figueroa Street with turns at Adams Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard, as fast as possible, though many participants played their own personal soundtracks on earbuds or enjoyed the entertainment provided en route -- dance and music, including Chinese lion dances, Brazilian capoeira dancers, Japanese taiko drummers and Mexican mariachis.

So, I'm in the elevator at Southern California's food porn capitol -- the two-story Whole Foods on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena -- when my eye strays to one of those earth-toned signs advertising a cooking class/singles event. Imagine my surprise when the name Maynard James Keenan jumps out at me! Along with the phrase "wine tasting"!

Actually, the surprise was minimal. The multi-tasking prog rock master from Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer has been doing the grocery-store circuit for a while, offering autographs and sips from the bins of his Arizona vineyards. He hit his first Whole Foods back in April. (Idolator blogger Dan Gibson spotted that event while shopping for overpriced lettuce in Arizona; Keenan can keep his PR budget down for these events, since music scribes apparently love to shop Earthbound Farm-fancy.)

The current wine tour has Keenan and his partner, Eric Glomski, sampling from the first vintages of Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, a new business uniting the two winemakers on the refreshed ground of an old vineyard near Willcox, Ariz.

If you haven't yet seen "Hamlet 2," the joyfully ridiculous comedy centered on Dana Marschz, a high-school drama teacher short on talent but overstocked with ambitions, the time is nigh. With the summer season officially over and "real life" back in full swing, we need a humbling reminder that our most precious of pursuits -- for Steve Coogan's Marschz, it's acting! in the most James Lipton sense of the word -- can often be undone by what we lack (talent, good sense) and elevated by the teamwork of several wastoid Tucson teens (or whatever strange details apply to your own life). The overarching life lesson is to enjoy it all, though life lessons are exactly the kind of earnest fluff that gets torn to pieces in "Hamlet 2," but in a giddy, sly John Waters way.

At the center of "Hamlet 2," the movie and the musical inside the movie, is "Rock Me Sexy Jesus," a middle finger of sorts to the high-school board that canceled drama. It involves Jesus in a tank top and jeans, strutting his "swimmer's bod" to the squealing admiration of a coterie of girls and bi-curious guys. You can watch a little bit of it above.

We talked with music supervisor Ralph Sall, who wrote the music for "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" and other songs from "Hamlet 2," such as the inimitable "You're as Gay as the Day Is Long." His background includes producing for Paul McCartney, Jane's Addiction and the Ramones; and writing tracks for musicians as diverse as Liz Phair and George Clinton.

So, writing "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" was just another day in the life -- almost. If you don't count that gospel choir that was hanging around...

Las Vegas' MAGIC Marketplace, a long-running fashion trade show, features every style and brand of clothing you could imagine, but the real fun is in the streetwear area. You get live music and the chance to snap shots of rappers who are either pushing their own clothing brands or helping a friend. Also, this being Vegas, MAGIC remains the place to see and be seen.

 

Brooklyn rapper Sean Price (pictured, left), a favorite of rap-loving internet heads, was on hand pushing clothing brand Society Original.

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Maynard James Keenan tours local Whole Foods stores

So, I'm in the elevator at Southern California's food porn capitol -- the two-story Whole Foods on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena -- when my eye strays to one of those earth-toned signs advertising a cooking class/singles event. Imagine my surprise when the name Maynard James Keenan jumps out at me! Along with the phrase "wine tasting"!

Actually, the surprise was minimal. The multi-tasking prog rock master from Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer has been doing the grocery-store circuit for a while, offering autographs and sips from the bins of his Arizona vineyards. He hit his first Whole Foods back in April. (Idolator blogger Dan Gibson spotted that event while shopping for overpriced lettuce in Arizona; Keenan can keep his PR budget down for these events, since music scribes apparently love to shop Earthbound Farm-fancy.)

The current wine tour has Keenan and his partner, Eric Glomski, sampling from the first vintages of Arizona Stronghold Vineyards, a new business uniting the two winemakers on the refreshed ground of an old vineyard near Willcox, Ariz.

If you haven't yet seen "Hamlet 2," the joyfully ridiculous comedy centered on Dana Marschz, a high-school drama teacher short on talent but overstocked with ambitions, the time is nigh. With the summer season officially over and "real life" back in full swing, we need a humbling reminder that our most precious of pursuits -- for Steve Coogan's Marschz, it's acting! in the most James Lipton sense of the word -- can often be undone by what we lack (talent, good sense) and elevated by the teamwork of several wastoid Tucson teens (or whatever strange details apply to your own life). The overarching life lesson is to enjoy it all, though life lessons are exactly the kind of earnest fluff that gets torn to pieces in "Hamlet 2," but in a giddy, sly John Waters way.

At the center of "Hamlet 2," the movie and the musical inside the movie, is "Rock Me Sexy Jesus," a middle finger of sorts to the high-school board that canceled drama. It involves Jesus in a tank top and jeans, strutting his "swimmer's bod" to the squealing admiration of a coterie of girls and bi-curious guys. You can watch a little bit of it above.

We talked with music supervisor Ralph Sall, who wrote the music for "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" and other songs from "Hamlet 2," such as the inimitable "You're as Gay as the Day Is Long." His background includes producing for Paul McCartney, Jane's Addiction and the Ramones; and writing tracks for musicians as diverse as Liz Phair and George Clinton.

So, writing "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" was just another day in the life -- almost. If you don't count that gospel choir that was hanging around...

Las Vegas' MAGIC Marketplace, a long-running fashion trade show, features every style and brand of clothing you could imagine, but the real fun is in the streetwear area. You get live music and the chance to snap shots of rappers who are either pushing their own clothing brands or helping a friend. Also, this being Vegas, MAGIC remains the place to see and be seen.

 

Brooklyn rapper Sean Price (pictured, left), a favorite of rap-loving internet heads, was on hand pushing clothing brand Society Original.

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

'Rock Me Sexy Jesus' channels John Waters' outrageous spirit

If you haven't yet seen "Hamlet 2," the joyfully ridiculous comedy centered on Dana Marschz, a high-school drama teacher short on talent but overstocked with ambitions, the time is nigh. With the summer season officially over and "real life" back in full swing, we need a humbling reminder that our most precious of pursuits -- for Steve Coogan's Marschz, it's acting! in the most James Lipton sense of the word -- can often be undone by what we lack (talent, good sense) and elevated by the teamwork of several wastoid Tucson teens (or whatever strange details apply to your own life). The overarching life lesson is to enjoy it all, though life lessons are exactly the kind of earnest fluff that gets torn to pieces in "Hamlet 2," but in a giddy, sly John Waters way.

At the center of "Hamlet 2," the movie and the musical inside the movie, is "Rock Me Sexy Jesus," a middle finger of sorts to the high-school board that canceled drama. It involves Jesus in a tank top and jeans, strutting his "swimmer's bod" to the squealing admiration of a coterie of girls and bi-curious guys. You can watch a little bit of it above.

We talked with music supervisor Ralph Sall, who wrote the music for "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" and other songs from "Hamlet 2," such as the inimitable "You're as Gay as the Day Is Long." His background includes producing for Paul McCartney, Jane's Addiction and the Ramones; and writing tracks for musicians as diverse as Liz Phair and George Clinton.

So, writing "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" was just another day in the life -- almost. If you don't count that gospel choir that was hanging around...

Las Vegas' MAGIC Marketplace, a long-running fashion trade show, features every style and brand of clothing you could imagine, but the real fun is in the streetwear area. You get live music and the chance to snap shots of rappers who are either pushing their own clothing brands or helping a friend. Also, this being Vegas, MAGIC remains the place to see and be seen.

 

Brooklyn rapper Sean Price (pictured, left), a favorite of rap-loving internet heads, was on hand pushing clothing brand Society Original.

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Dispatches from MAGIC Trade Show in Las Vegas

Las Vegas' MAGIC Marketplace, a long-running fashion trade show, features every style and brand of clothing you could imagine, but the real fun is in the streetwear area. You get live music and the chance to snap shots of rappers who are either pushing their own clothing brands or helping a friend. Also, this being Vegas, MAGIC remains the place to see and be seen.

 

Brooklyn rapper Sean Price (pictured, left), a favorite of rap-loving internet heads, was on hand pushing clothing brand Society Original.

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Tommy Chong promotes new book and hip-hop street cred

Tommy Chong, counterculture hero and champion to medicinal marijuana advocates, made a stop for his tell-all  "Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography" at the Barnes & Noble Santa Monica Promenade Wednesday night. The septuagenarian is, obviously, one-half of Grammy-winning team Cheech & Chong, whose 1978 film "Up in Smoke," stands as the seminal pothead comedy. (Sorry, Judd Apatow and friends.)

Lean, tan and seemingly fit for a dude his age, Chong, who once played a protective convict called Squirrel Master in a 1998 Dave Chappelle flick -- a role he referred to as “scary” and “sorta prophetic” -- gave a half-hour routine mixed with family talk, tales of the good ol' days and jokes about his nearly nine-month stint in prison. (He was released in 2004).

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Glen Campbell gives the Velvet Underground a go

GLEN CAMPBELL singing the music of Green Day and the Velvet Underground may not top the list of Great Moments in Pop Weirdness -- that'd go to Pat Boone's heavy metal phase a decade ago when he got hip to Metallica and Alice Cooper. But it's close.

"Meet Glen Campbell," arriving Tuesday, also lets the veteran singer and guitarist apply his signature soaring tenor and deeply twanging electric guitar to U2's "All I Want is You," the Replacements' "Sadly, Beautiful" and a pair of Tom Petty songs.

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Nico Muhly's many 'Tongues'

The first vocal lines of the young composer Nico Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue,” are seemingly arbitrary lists of numbers and addresses. Sung by ethereal mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer over aching strings and a distorted sub-bass synthesizer, the arrangement feels like a Stockhausen gag; a misdirection that subverts your expectations about how the work might move you. For Muhly, however, there’s poetry in all that data.

“If you ask someone to name all the phone numbers you can off the top of your head, it’s going to be pretty interesting,” Muhly said. “When I asked the singer to name all of the phone numbers she knew, it was fascinating. It was her dad’s office from 20 years ago, or a friend’s number in Florence. You can tease narrative out of anything. You know how on Wikipedia there are these lists of things like ‘List of Horrible Ethnic Slurs’ or ‘List of Famous Canadian Homosexuals’? That’s such a poignant way to organize the world.”

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Ozomatli on the air: Band gets their own radio morning show

Ulises Bella of Ozomatli sounded happy but worried: "It's going to be hard to get up in the morning. I mean I'm excited; this is good news. But being on the radio at 6 a.m.? That's hard for me. I mean, 6 a.m. is when I'm usually going to bed. But coffee and afternoon naps work miracles."

The miracle is that the morning show at KYSR-FM (98.7) here in L.A. (once a place you could listen to, augh, Danny Bonaduce and the shrill Jamie White) will soon be deeply eclectic — and especially crowded. The Grammy-winning L.A. band Ozomatli is taking over the rock station’s morning shift as of 6 a.m. on Aug. 20. Expect a seriously diverse playlist, considering the act made a name for itself with a singular Southern California hybrid of rock, salsa, hip-hop, cumbia, funk, dub, Middle Eastern sounds and soul.

The polyglot orchestra is also famous for filling the stage: There are six principle members at the moment, but the lineup has hit 10 before.

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

?uestlove's new Nike sneaks; Raekwon the Chef talks about his collab with Dre

Although sneaker purists will tell you that the quality and design of kicks have fallen short since Nike's mass marketing and global takeover of the last decade, there's still a religious fanaticism with certain shoe releases that your average consumer just won't get (literally and figuratively).

Like camping out on a Vine Street sidewalk to buy a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

For the 100 sneaker fashionistas gathered on Wednesday night, it was worth the wait. Most people, lawn chairs in tow, waited more than a day in line just to secure a spot in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater in Hollywood for the release of limited run shoes designed by DJ/drummer/producer Amir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots hip-hop collective. It helped, of course, that ?uestlove was also treating the sneakfreaks to an event-exclusive DJ set.

His Air Questo's lime green colorway and elephant print design is exotic and bright, but according to ?uestlove, candy had more to do with the shoe's concept than the jungle.

"We decided to put a twist on it … a quasi-Willy Wonka Golden Ticket twist," he said of the $175 shoe.

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

'Twilight' meets Blue October: Stephenie Meyer fans can't get enough of Justin Furstenfeld

For Blue October, the timing couldn't be more perfect.

As the band put the final touches on its upcoming album "Approaching Normal," Stephenie Meyer wrote the final installment in the "Twilight" saga "Breaking Dawn." She listened to Blue October while she wrote and when the time came to put together a book tour, Meyer decided all the screaming from fans that she had not grown used to could be put to better purpose. Why not, she thought, invite one of the artists that inspired her final novel to tour with her?

Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld quickly agreed.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Bidoun becomes an unlikely home for great contemporary music writing

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Huey Lewis records theme for ‘Pineapple Express,’ complete with toking sound courtesy of Seth Rogen

Ask ’80s pop-rock superstar Huey Lewis how he wound up recording the title song for the highly anticipated stoner action-comedy “Pineapple Express,” due in theaters Aug. 6, and he’ll basically shrug.

“They e-mailed, ‘Would I write a song for a Seth Rogen movie?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Lewis, 58, recalled in a telephone interview from his Montana vacation home. “I don’t consider career moves. I just answer the phone. I’m flattered at my ripe old age to even be considered. It was all about fun.”

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Black Iris updates the ad jingle for Cadillac CTS

Every once in a while, a car commercial captures the collective imagination -- all because of its soundtrack. This summer, it's Boston-based advertising agency Modernista!’s sleek spot for Cadillac CTS, colloquially known as “Metal” and officially called "Accessories."

But what happens when the song in question is performed by a musical collective no one outside the ad industry has heard of? Pure chaos, apparently.

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Devendra Banhart pens preface to Kenneth Patchen’s ‘We Meet’

We don't know how things are progressing, if they are at all, with lady friend Natalie Portman, but Banhart has gone and gotten himself involved with a relaunch of the works of under-appreciated West Coast poet Kenneth Patchen. Good for you, Banhart. Romance may come and go, but books will never leave you.

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Jeezy and McCain: Gimme a hug

On the set of "Saturday Night Live" last month, Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express picked up an unlikely new passenger: Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. The New York Post's Page Six is reporting that Jeezy (who has publicly supported Barack Obama) was surprisingly impressed by the Republican presidential candidate at the show's taping, where Jeezy performed with Usher and McCain cracked groaner jokes about his age. The two also embraced during the show's closing credits.

"He greeted me like a god," said Jeezy, in comments made to Vibe magazine. "The fact that he acknowledged me was crazy. I said, 'I'm Young Jeezy, and it's rough out here.' He blew me off at first. I was like, 'Nah, for real. It's rough out here, so what you gonna do to change it?' . . . And he gave me a look back, like, 'I know.' "

The vast majority of rappers still appear to be backing Obama, whose dirt-off-your-shoulder gesture was and remains pretty indisputably awesome.

-- August Brown

Jeezy photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images, McCain photo by Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

When is a TV theme song a political weapon?

When it's the theme from "The Sopranos" used just coincidentally by the Washington state Democratic party in an ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. The ad is ostensibly a criticism of Foselli's close ties to a lobbying group, the Building Industry Assn. of Washington, and Rossi's own ads against Washington governor Chris Gregoire.

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

The mysteries of Love at the Mods & Rockers Film Festival

It’s about five blocks from the Egyptian Theatre to Cosmo Street, a proximity to keep in mind if you go to the Sunday night screening of “Love Story,” a documentary on the star-crossed Los Angeles band Love and its enigmatic leader, Arthur Lee (pictured above).

Cosmo was the site of Bido Lido’s, the small club where Love became a sensation on the L.A. scene in the mid-1960s, and if you stroll east on Hollywood Boulevard after the movie (part of the Mods & Rockers Film Festival), you might hear a lingering tambourine and catch a whiff of patchouli.

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Support for Obama proudly on display at the BET Awards

Barack Obama is not only the first black presidential candidate destined to earn a party nomination, but he's also the first truly cool candidate of the new millennium. Bruce Springsteen stumped for John Kerry on 2004's "Vote For Change" tour and Patti Smith sang with Ralph Nader at a Madison Square Garden rally for the independent candidate in 2000. But let's face it: Whatever you think of their politics, those greying patricians didn't have the secret weapon Obama is learning to deploy: the support of the people arguably most responsible for creating American style -- and inarguably behind American music -- since the dawn of our nation. As the late, immortal Curtis Mayfield might have said, Obama is fly. And that's going to help him this electoral season.

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

There goes $20: Pixies on ‘Rock Band’

Harmonix games announced Monday that they are adding the Pixies' classic 1989 album "Doolittle" as a downloadable add-on for their red-hot video game title, Rock Band.

Although "Wave of Mutilation" was included on the original Rock Band, fans can play tracks from the entire record beginning next week.

A press release touting the title namechecks several classic Pixies tracks from the breakthrough release, including "Here Comes Your Man."

However, Harmomix (oddly) chose to highlight the "spaghetti Western-ish flavor of 'Silver,' " in the same release hyping the new title ($1.99 per track or $18.99 for the entire album). We're not sure what the promotional department folks at Harmonix are smoking, but any Pixies fan knows "Silver" is the one stinker on "Doolittle"; and even if one did like the tune, we can't imagine it would be any fun to play on Rock Band.

But songs like "Tame," "Debaser" and "Crackity Jones" seem tailor-made for the game, and we now must bow down to the Boston-based company for offering up a record Kurt Cobain cited as one of his favorites.

It's one of ours too.

"Doolittle" will be available June 24 for XBox, and June 26 for Playstation.

For a complete list of tracks available, go to: www.rockband.com/dlc

-- Charlie Amter

Photo by Chapman Baehler

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Madonna’s right hand man turns up in ‘Zohan’

File this under: “What the?”

In the action comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” Maverick Records Chief Executive Guy Oseary turns up in a cameo role as an Israeli army counter-terrorism agent.

Riding in a car with Adam Sandler (as the titular sexed-up terrorist killing machine-turned-hair stylist Zohan) in one scene, the Israeli-born Oseary, 36, inhabits the role of Avi, uttering the unforgettable line of dialogue “Zohan, go!” as Sandler leaps from the speeding vehicle.

Not exactly what you'd expect from Madonna’s right hand man, the music industry hot shot who signed acts including Alanis Morissette, the Prodigy and Deftones to Maverick --  who, moreover, is the godfather to the Material Girl and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco and manages Lenny Kravitz.

But the “Zohan” role makes more sense when you consider that Oseary’s also the author of the book “Jews Who Rock.”

-- Chris Lee

Photo of Oseary in 1997 by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

New fix for Idol junkies: Eurovision finals set for Saturday

While U.S. television viewers have been obsessed with "American Idol" over the last few months, European music fans have been transfixed on "Eurovision," their longer-running (since 1956), song-centric version of "Idol."The second semifinals of the multi-country competition (each country sends a representative act and song to compete against other nations) was held yesterday, leaving 20 countries’ entries still standing and ready to proceed to the finals Saturday in Belgrade, where the event is being held, despite a rough year for the Serbian capital.

The nations surviving Thursday's elimination round are Iceland, 2004 winner Ukraine, Albania, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden, Turkey, Georgia, 2003 toppers Latvia and 2001 champs Denmark.

On Saturday, the aforementioned 10 will square off against 10 other countries who won the first semifinal, which took place earlier this week, with their representative acts.

Those countries include early favorite Russia, 2006 champs Finland, 2005 winner Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Poland, Azerbaijan, Norway, Armenia and Norway. Host country (and last year’s winners) Serbia and the four nations bankrolling the entire contest (Spain, France, Germany and England) get free passes into the finals Saturday.

Among the countries not making the cut for the finals this weekend? Ireland (who offered up a turkey glove puppet named Dustin as its entry), Bulgaria and Switzerland.

Don’t ask us how, exactly, the winner will be crowned at Eurovision.  The bizarre selection process for the competition is famously complex, with judges representing various countries often voting in groups. The Baltic states, for example, like to stick together.

And while Russia ("Believe") and Sweden ("Hero") are among those tipped to win this year, we like to think Ukraine has the best shot to take the "Eurovision" crown with Ani Lorak's catchy pop song borne from club music roots ("Shady Lady") .

"Shady Lady" seems to have all the elements of a winning tune: a danceable beat, cheesy lyrics and a "hot" lead singer who knows how to smile for the camera and, more important, the judges.

You can stream the finals live Saturday from several websites, including the official Eurovision site or here.

--Charlie Amter

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Lisa Loeb on tonight’s ‘Gossip Girl’

Last week's episode of "Gossip Girl," the CW's televised homage to headbands and madras, ended with a cliffhanger: Serena told best frenemy Blair that she'd murdered someone, OMG! My theory is that she drove someone to suicide with one of her previous dalliances -- I'm not seeing a pistol to the gut on the CW. Anyway, tonight's episode should give us a bigger, sordid reveal on this whole murder thing, along with a cameo from Lisa Loeb, the '90s bespectacled siren of the one-hit wonder "Stay (I Missed You)"! Occasional Soundboard contributer Enid Portuguez fills us in on the details of Loeb's appearance here. Expect at least one pair of tortoise shell glasses amid "Gossip Girl's" unusually high quota of leggings and sparkle.

-- Margaret Wappler

Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

GTAIV: Car-jacking to the Rapture

If the acronym GTA IV means anything to you, then today is a very special day. A few folks have probably called in sick already because they waited outside their local Gamestop until midnight to pick up the latest in the much-maligned video game franchise. Then, of course, said parties went home and engaged in virtual bedlam all night. There's a reason parents fear this game. Still, it gets an A+ rating in today's Times.

The new version of "Grand Theft" isn't just a boost for the gaming world, however. With this edition, the game's creators are partnering with Amazon.com to help zap some life into music sales.

As with previous GTA titles, music plays a central role in the chaos, as the CGI character swerves in various automobiles and car jacks different vehicles. Just like real life, what's playing on the radio is significant. For the gamer, in fact, it's a selling point.

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to do killer business -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million its first week.

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Yeesh: Devendra Banhart dating Natalie Portman?

Normally, we trust Perez Hilton about as far as we can throw him (0.3 meter at last attempt), but the rumors that beard aficionado Devendra Banhart (who we used to run into at the Little Joy every other weekend a few years back) is putting the freak in freak folk with Padmé Amidala seem pretty reasonable. We personally think it's a giant step down from Gael García Bernal, but then again, we can't wait until Devendra picks a fight with Wes Anderson over this.

-- August Brown

Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Conchords on a roll

If you happened to be at Glendale’s Moonlight Rollerway on Sunday night, you’d have been treated to the sight of Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. Flight of the Conchords, wobbling unsteadily around the rink as the crowd of hard-core regular skaters zipped past them. No, neither Conchord was celebrating a birthday — the duo was on wheels in preparation for a video they’ll be shooting this week for the song “Ladies of the World.”

We suggest they also watch this clip from “Xanadu” for inspiration:

Next month, FOTC will roll out on a national tour in support of their self-titled SubPop album, with the final show at the Orpheum Theatre on May 30.

-- Pauline O'Connor

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Listen to the suburbs tonight at L.A.C.E.

My smarty-pal Karen Tongson is not only a first-class scholar and theorist who rocks the classroom at USC, but she also knows how to throw a party, complete with umbrella cocktails and a karaoke machine. Tongson's part of a new wave of pop-loving academics uncovering alternate histories in the corners where mass culture meets the underground -- I've seen her wax profound (and hilarious) on topics ranging from queer East L.A. to "straight boy emo" to "Make It Real," the 1980s hit by Tongan family band the Jets. She and her fellow "Ph Divas" Christine Bacareza Balance and Alexandra Vasquez dish the deep thoughts at my daily read, Oh! Industry, and Karen also maintains Inland Emperor, a chronicle of her explorations of queer suburban identity, which she'll eventually publish in book form.

The suburbs are the subject this evening, when Karen hosts a listening party at L.A.C.E., co-sponsored by the Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center at USC. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'll bet it enlightens me about what's really happening in the malls and backyards of Riverside.

And the TV rooms: On her blog, Karen offers some tantalizing clips from the crazy '80s variety show "Solid Gold" as a preview. Elvis Costello! Expose! So come and wallow in the New Wave.

--Ann Powers

Suburbs: A Listening Party, at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777. 7 p.m. today. $5.

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Odds, ends and awards

A country for starlets: I love the Coen brothers, but their shruggish acceptance speeches unfortunately defined what felt like one of the most perfunctory Oscars in years -- with one notable exception: Marion Cotillard, who played Edith Piaf to brilliant, mind-blowing, shape-shifting perfection in "La Vie en Rose." You might think I'm grossly overselling it, but the frothy adjectives apply. See it now, if you haven't already.

Homeward bound: We're heathens around these parts but we were sad to hear about Larry Norman's death Sunday.

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Everything’s gone green — except for the meat

Oscar week got off to an early start Wednesday night with a music-themed party honoring (we think) our beloved planet Earth. The 5th annual Global Green Pre-Oscar Party featured performances by Michelle Branch, Damien Rice, Oscar-nominated duo Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from "Once" and Michael Franti.

Branch's performance proved the highlight of the evening, with a set heavy on new material, including "Long Goodbye," her song with Dwight Yoakam from her forthcoming full-length. Branch, wearing a white silk dress, also offered up a nice rendition of Tom Petty's "You Wreck Me" for the crowd, which seemed heavy on agents (or just guys who could afford the tickets) and their much younger dates. And Adrian Grenier was there too, lest you think only agents care about the environment.

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Top of the Ticket: Boston’s Tom Scholz says stop to Mike Huckabee

A hearty endorsement to our friends at the Top of the Ticket blog. They have a nice item about how Boston, the arena rockers, have asked Mike Huckabee's campaign to cease and desist from playing "More Than a Feeling."

--Margaret Wappler

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

In Style Grammy Party with Rihanna and a chat with Jimmy Jam

Last night, In Style magazine and the Recording Academy celebrated musicians-turned-designers such as Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jessica Simpson and Justin Timberlake. Of course, none of them were actually there, but models with jutting hip bones showed off their wares in a quick fashion show united by a love of Skittles- colored tights and extroverted pop attitude. There was free champagne. Rihanna, in red glassy lips and her latest hairstyle (will it give rise to the tiny backhawk?), closed the show with a flawlessly confidant performance, one that made it hard to believe she's only 19. But did I mention there was free champagne?

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Laromlab plays tonight at Motion Lab

If you're of a certain age, you can sing the Super Mario Brothers and/or Zelda theme songs on command. So, it's no surprise that musician Laromlab (a.k.a. Brandon Harrod) has turned to chiptunes to craft his blippy, "chasing a mushroom on level three" compositions. What are chiptunes? They're songs composed in a format whereby all the sounds are synthesized in real time by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of a sample-based synthesis. Check him out tonight at Motion Lab, where he is likely to break out his chiptune versions of Daft Punk classics such as "Around the World." It sounds like the Super Mario Brothers commanding the decks at Paris' Respect. Stream his upcoming self-titled album here.

--Margaret Wappler

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

George Michael on ‘Eli Stone’ tonight

Well, we know he has "Faith," har har, but George Michael as a guardian angel? Watch the pilot episode of "Eli Stone" at 10 tonight on ABC and you'll see George in the role of Jonny Lee Miller's heavenly adviser. According to the George Michael online fanclub (and no, I'm not an official member), "the series follows a successful corporate attorney, Eli Stone (Miller), who turns over a new leaf and sets forth to help out the 'little guy.' George appears in dream sequences where he imparts sage advice to Eli, encouraging him to do good deeds." And taking things even further, each episode of the season will be titled after a song from George's extensive oeuvre. Can't wait for the "I Want Your Sex" episode. C-c-c-c-c'mon!

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Miller, left, is blessed by a grinning George. Credit: Dean Freedman / ABC]

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Arthur Russell, reimagined

The Arthur Russell story begins in an unlikely place: A gay cello virtuoso from Oskaloosa, Iowa, moves to New York and takes up with the downtown literati, palling around with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass in the '70s and '80s while crafting otherworldly disco singles and experimental chamber suites. It might have ended on a sadly all-too-precedented note, when Russell died of AIDS complications in 1992.

Fortunately, it didn't. A resurgent interest in Russell's work, helped along by lovingly curated compilations and reissues like Soul Jazz Records' 2004 "The World of Arthur Russell" is catching on among young artists who, like Russell, don't see boundaries between pop, disco and the avant-garde. A new four-track e.p. of covers by admiring indie songwriters and arrangers (such as the effortlessly charming Swede Jens Lekman, whose kalimba take on Russell's "A Little Lost" is above, and one by Victoria Bergsman, the ex-Concretes singer and inescapable-in-'07 Peter Bjorn and John collaborator) highlights the songcraft buried beneath his bottom-of-the-ocean atmospherics, and Deerhunter frontman/ Atlas Sound mastermind Bradford Cox recently posted a woozy remix of Russell's "Answers Me" on the Deerhunter blog.

Lekman and Cox are heirs to Russell's wide-eyed instincts for making art songs and noisy tone poems into inviting and danceable pop singles (they also each evoke his sad-eyed pan-sexual showmanship). But for the orginal article, Matt Wolf’s forthcoming documentary "Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell" evokes Russell's playful, melancholy and ever-searching mind through interviews with Glass, Russell's lover Tom Lee, Lekman and many others along with often-devasting footage of the man at work and a downtown utopia (fantastical or otherwise) collapsing around him.

--August Brown

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Scarlett Johansson’s debut album due May 20

We got news a few minutes ago that Scarlett Johansson's first album will arrive with the May flowers. Now, many famous thespians lament that the media don't take these endeavors seriously, but we think it's perfectly fine if actors want to flirt with being rock stars, chanteuses, country badasses or whatever else. But we're also allowed to be skeptical. Don Johnson, Corey Feldman, Paris Hilton, William Shatner and dozens of others have made us this way. It also, frankly, reeks of fame-hogging. Share the wealth -- literally! Anyway, here's the press release:

"Scarlett Johansson will release her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, on Atco Records, an imprint of Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, on May 20. The inspired album features 10 Tom Waits songs and includes one original track. Collaborating with TV on the Radio producer David Sitek, Johansson is also joined by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Sean Antanaitis from Celebration, as well as others. Johansson spent five weeks last spring recording in Louisiana at Dockside Studios."

Despite our teases, we're keeping an open mind on this one. Lucky for Scarlett, we still watch "Ghost World" on an annual basis. Here's hoping she can summon a little more presence than she did singing along with the Jesus and Mary Chain at Coachella last year, where her wispy vocals apparently disappeared into the admittedly powerful hive of guitars. So, Wendy O. Williams she ain't, but maybe she can work some kind of femme-hobo spirit covering those Waits tracks.

More soon on celebs and records...

-- Margaret Wappler

[Photo: Scarlett Johansson performs with Jim Reid, lead singer of Jesus and Mary Chain. Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times]

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Kimya Dawson essentially has the No. 8 album in the country

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Bill Wyman’s love of silver and gold

So which member of the Rolling Stones do you think of when you hear the terms "spooky ancient relic" and "dug up from a shallow grave"? Yeah, us, too. But actually, it turns out Bill Wyman is the right answer. The retired Stones bassist (who just played with his band, the Rhythm Kings, at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute in London) is quite the amateur archaeologist or, as he describes himself, a "history detective," which we think means he wears a deerstalker cap, puffs on a curved pipe and randomly shouts "Elementary, my dear Jagger!"

Wyman started getting his hands dirty back in 1968 when he bought a house in Suffolk and stumbled on fragments of past cultures on the grounds. Through the years he's dug up more than 300 coins as well as his most precious find, an 18th century ring bearing the seal of John Weniave, the High Sheriff of Suffolk, who, coincidently, was a big fan of the Stones back in their Crawdaddy Club days. Anyway, Wyman has been frustrated through the years with balky (and bulky) metal detectors so he designed his own signed special edition detector, which costs 125 pounds (U.K.). In his sales pitch he says: "Metal detecting is not just for anoraks or eccentrics." Well, who can argue with that?

--Geoff Boucher

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton

Queens of the Stone Age show ‘No Reservations’

There's little about the Queens of the Stone Age or their gigantic ginger frontman that makes you think, "You know, this band really knows holiday cheer," but maybe that's precisely why it was so comforting to see Josh Homme and the boys, clad in the ugliest Christmas sweaters known to man, helping cantankerous celeb chef / Travel Channel fixture Anthony Bourdain ring in the season on last night's very special Christmas special. The show was filled with Bourdain's usual vegan-baiting sarcasm and vaguely informational set pieces, but Queens of the Stone Age fairly stole the show with some original holiday tunes bookending the commercial breaks, including an unplugged ode to fois gras, a sweet little song about daddy getting too drunk to make Christmas dinner, and a show-closing live clip of "3's & 7's" from Era Vulgaris.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much interaction between the band and the Ramones-loving Bourdain for much of the show (other than a vaguely forced, can-you-kids-keep-the-noise-down skit), but seeing Homme in his holiday finery downing the last bits from everyone's cups of eggnog before being called to the dinner table was a little touch of holiday magic. Somehow no clips from the show are on YouTube yet, but here's a Travel Channel interview with QOTSA talking about their appearance. Ho ho ho.

-- Chris Barton