Would PBS ever greenlight something as interesting and non-Ken-Burns-y as "Synth Britannia," to which BBC viewers were recently treated? The documentary is described on the BBC website as site as "following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage."

Were Pete Townsend and Brian Eno, who predate the musicians profiled, really "the experimental fringes"? In any case, the BBC says that the Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment for synthesizer-driven music came in 1979, when Gary Numan appeared on the British show Top of the Pops.

Numan's best-known song in the United States is "Cars," which brings us to one of the themes of the documentary: the link between synth-pop and the work of the English writer J.G. Ballard, known for his dystopian ruminations on modern life, most famously in the novel "Crash."

Writes someone who worked on the documentary:

Early on when we were discussing themes and motifs to explore in Synth Britannia the topic of JG Ballard came up in conversation.… The world Ballard described in books like Crash and Concrete Island felt like a dystopian vision of the future and yet it was actually the present day rendered alien -- a world of motorways, concrete underpasses, airports, subways lit with fluorescent lights, spaghetti junctions and giant concrete tower blocks. In short, this was 70s Britain -- old Victorian slums and city centres eviscerated and concreted over.

This link between the environment and the music became very apparent on our travels around Britain to meet the pioneers of synthesizer music. All of the early synth artists found themselves making music in urban areas from the run down, empty streets of East London to industrial Sheffield under the shadow of the massive concrete Park Hill Estate.

In two excerpts from the documentary highlighted on the blog Ballardian, the connection between Ballard and the synth-pop pioneers are probed. The influence of "Crash" on the music videos for "Warm Leatherette," by The Normal (really one musician, Daniel Miller), and Numan's "Cars" could not be more explicit. The former video stresses the violence inherent in the book, the latter the sensuality.

Miller speaks eloquently about his debt to Ballard. I am not convinced, however, at least from this clip, that Numan--as opposed to his video director--knew anything about the novelist. Here's Numan, for instance, plumbing (in Nigel Tufnel fashion) what drove him to write such lyrics as "Here in my car / I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors":

"'Cars' is just about feeling safe, in amongst people. In a car."

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, and Priscilla Wald, a professor of English and womens' studies at Duke, debate the new Harvard University Press reference work.

After warming up, Bauerlein comes to his main point:

The old Master Narratives and Concepts have no place either--American Adam, Symbolism, and American Literature, etc.--except for one. It resounds in the beginning, where the editors explain why entries proliferate after the Civil War: They note that "the story of the United States becomes a story of previously disenfranchised, despised, degraded, excluded, enslaved, brutalized, and even unspeakable Americans claiming their place as full citizens, demanding not only the right to speak but the right to be heard, remaking the country as surely as any before them, and, in novels, poems, paintings, speeches, and acts, judging it as it had never been judged before."

That angle, emotional and partisan as it is, calls for judgment. It seems to me a loaded approach, overemphasizing the victims, conceived in resentment, aggrandizing one kind of American experience and excluding others from the story. With two-thirds of the volume following the disenfranchised-franchised pattern, this isn't a literary history of America. It's a drama of multiculturalist emergence.

Retorts Wald:

We both see a "drama of multiculturalist emergence," but we see it very differently.… This volume includes a range of voices expressed in a variety of media and forms, and the drama it stages to my eyes resembles something more like a Bakhtinian carnival than the morality play you describe.

The exchange is in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and includes a response by Werner Sollors, co-editor of the volume.

Ben Yagoda has a new book out, with the nice title "Memoir: A History." Covering it, the Philadelphia Inquirer states:

The emphasis on memoir is so strong that autobiography, history and fiction may be endangered. And the reasons for memoir's popularity may rest in our very nature as Americans: In a land where the majority rules, individuality is exalted and memoir is more befitting the American ideal of resourcefulness.

"When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction's day is done," Yagoda says.

I can't decide whether Yagoda or his profiler is the more egregious hyperbolist, but Yagoda has the excuse of flogging a book.

(Also, how curious to suggest that the value of fiction lies in "proving points and making cases.")

Hat tip: Jennifer Howard

P.S. Hold on. The memoir also endangers autobiography?

On her new album, "Sacrificium," the opera star Cecilia Bartoli sings music originally written for castrati, men who (to put the point gently) had been surgically altered as boys, so that their voices would never break. They sang in high registers associated today with women but had the powerful bodies and lung capacities of male singers, enabling distinct, and apparently sublime, artistic effects. For a century after 1680, they dominated opera throughout much of Europe, and such performers as Ferri, Farinelli, and Caffarelli became some of the first opera superstars.

In interviews and on her web site, Bartoli has stressed the grim and tragic aspects of the castrati phenomenon. Some classical critics have challenged her claim that, during the Baroque period, Italy alone was castrating 3,000 to 4,000 boys a year for artistic purposes, but, regardless of the figure, many were mutilated and only a few became elite performers. And being a castrated star was surely not a psychologically unfraught experience, either.

The photographs of Bartoli commissioned to accompany "Sacrificium" are as striking as the music on the CD. Playing with the theme of gender confusion inherent in the topic, the photographer Uli Weber placed Bartoli's head, her face whitened with makeup, atop various marble statues of men.

(The NPR web site features two interviews with Bartoli, conducted by Scott Simon and Tom Huizenga. The latter is a web-only chat in which Bartoli fields questions from listeners.)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died on Oct. 30, age 100, was an extraordinarily influential figure in France by the early 1960s, but "hardly known in this country," according to a young Susan Sontag. Sontag, therefore, took it upon herself to hail him in a 1963 essay, published in the New York Review of Books, that helped to broaden his reputation. It later appeared, in expanded form, as "The Anthropologist as Hero," in her collection "Against Interpretation."

Lévi-Strauss, Sontag wrote, was prototypically modern in that he had responded to the alienating aspects of contemporary life--its accelerating speed, its homogeneity--by immersing himself its opposite: the exotic, the hyperlocal, the "primitive."

Though he was a scholar and not a man of letters, she wrote, his "beautifully written" work "Tristes Tropiques" was "one of the great books of our century."

Explaining the book's origins, she writes that, during long university vacations, and at one point for more than a year,

Lévi-Strauss lived among Indian tribes in the interior of Brazil. "Tristes Tropiques" offers a record of his encounters with these tribes--the nomadic, missionary-murdering Nambikwara, the Tupi-Kawahib whom no white man had ever seen before, the materially splendid Bororo, the ceremonious Caduveo who produce huge amounts of abstract painting and sculpture. But the greatness of "Tristes Tropiques" lies not simply in this sensitive reportage, but in the way Lévi-Strauss uses his experience--to reflect on the nature of landscape, on the meaning of physical hardship, on the city in the Old World and the New, on the idea of travel, on sunsets, on modernity, on the connection between literacy and power.

"Conrad in his fiction," Sontag wrote, "and T.E. Lawrence, Saint-Exupéry, [and the French essayist and novelist Henry de] Montherlant among others in their lives as well as their writing, created the métier of the adventurer as a spiritual vocation."

Likewise, "Claude Lévi-Strauss has invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst."

On Friday, there was a fistfight in the Style section of the Washington Post. An older editor, Henry Allen, a literary lion/New Journalist in his day, called a piece that two younger colleagues had just turned in the second-worst piece of dreck he'd read in four-plus decades at the newspaper. One of the recipients of this insult, a young feature writer, took umbrage and his rebuttal included a vulgarity. Allen counter-rebutted with his fists. The paper's top editor, Marcus Brauchli, was among those who broke up the quite serious scrum.

Today, Gene Weingarten, the Post's humor columnist, weighs in, writing: "Hooray." In these days of fiscal worry and editorial overcautiousness, he writes, he's glad that some writers and editors, at least, still have passion for their work, and high standards.

Which brings us to that question lingering in the air: what was the worst story Allen ever read? Weingarten hears it was a profile of Paul Robeson so weak it was never published. Still, emboldened by the new free-for-all atmosphere at his paper, Weingarten offers his own nominee for the worst piece every published in Style. It appeared in 1999, and the author was Sally Quinn, wife of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee.

It was a feature story suffused with New Age thinking, in which Quinn endorsed a supposed miracle experienced by a woman who had walked through a labyrinth designed to foster spiritual thoughts. As she made her way through the maze, the woman told Quinn,

Suddenly, I was in a very bright light. I had a vision of an Indian face with long straight hair, blowing in the wind. He had uplifted arms. He kept telling me to look up. I kept looking up. I was engulfed in light. …

And there was evidence!

A volunteer, Carol Davis, took pictures with a digital camera as they were finishing up. Flipping through the images, she stopped, stunned, at a shot of the group. For there, in the center of the picture, was what looked like a brilliant shaft of multicolored light, coming from above and directed exactly at Arrigan.

[Pause as Quinn expatiates about coinciding solstices, and full moons, and historical facts about Indians that she thinks underscores the link between labyrinths and the spirit world.]

Alas, experts don't find the digital photograph Quinn hails to be evidence of much except a camera glitch:

Members of the Washington Post photo department have examined the pictures of Marylin Arrigan at the labyrinth and declared the apparent shaft of light to be nothing more than "lens flare," an optical effect produced within the camera lens itself. Andrew Davidhazy, an expert on photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, agreed.

Does this deter Quinn? It does not.

But there are many things for which science has a ready answer but the human heart cannot so easily dismiss.… Lens flare or spiritual experience? Or both? You decide.

So what's Quinn up to now? She "co-moderates On Faith, a Washington Post and Newsweek blog about religion and its impact on global life." Oy.

(Via The Awl)

PS. Disclosure: My wife works at the Post but, sadly, saw nothing. She is trained in karate.

Haven't heard the much-discussed Christmas album, but I think that Bob Dylan's previous two albums were overpraised. Sure, he and the band did a fine job of summoning up all sorts of rootsy, bluesy sounds and song forms, but there's not enough Dylan there, or the Dylan I like. In 1997's "Time Out of Mind," in contrast, the songwriter makes use of the olde-timey material rather than being mastered by it.

My thoughts, unfortunately, do not comport with Andrew Ferguson's witty "Dylan roots theory," which he calls "famous, to me at least":

Whenever Dylan did something artistically egregious, in poor taste, inept, schlocky, or otherwise incompatible with his reputation for genius, the reviewers would explain that he was a kind of musicologist, plumbing the roots of Americana, absorbing within himself the variegated traditions of our native music and transmuting them into art uniquely his own.

The first problem with this theory is that Dylan is, in a purely descriptive sense, a kind of musicologist. This judgment has little to do with the quality of various albums; it's not a critical get-out-of-jail-free card. (You can, as I did above, use the observation to criticize Dylan. He's doing too much rummaging, not enough songwriting.)

The second problem is that, pace Ferguson, Andrew Ferguson and Greil Marcus are not the only two writers to have noticed that Dylan's output is, shall we say, uneven. My trusty 1983 copy of "The New Rolling Stone Record Guide" gives "Self-Portrait"--an album Ferguson says critics fell for--one star, calling it "a disaster that crossed all critical boundaries," and offers a bullet to "Dylan" and "Live at Budokan" (a bullet translates as "worthless" under the guide's rating system). There may be critics who fawn over everything Dylan produces, hailing the rootsiness of it all, but I don't know of them.

Of course, the record guide I mentioned gives "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" five stars, but Ferguson doesn't mention that one, because he thinks Dylan's output can be summed up by the 1990 song "Wiggle" ("Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup"). If that strikes you as a hilariously trenchant observation, then this is your critical take-down piece of the week.

For a tidy summary of the rough straits that higher education finds itself in -- or, at least, that Ph.D. candidates in the humanities find themselves in; college presidents seem to be doing okay--you could do worse than read Louis Menand's piece in the latest issue of Harvard Magazine. It's adapted from his forthcoming book, "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University" (Norton).

Menand notes that the post-war boom in higher education created, by 1975, an oversupply of humanities professors and Ph.D. programs. Yet the problems are worse, or at least weirder, than a mere mismatch of supply and demand might suggest. For example, today

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the number-one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs--graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations.

Menand's conclusion? "There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs."

There is not much that's new in the article, but that very observation happens to be one of Menand's themes. Perversity has become routine, the new normal as it were:

What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since

So accustomed is the academy to its new reality that you can find professors and deans who will defend years spent clinging to a branch as years well spent. The people who write such pieces tend to have tenure, however.

Colson Whitehead runs through some genre possibilities for his next book, with a capsule summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative: magical realism, the thriller, the book that "holds a mirror up to our society," and so on. Some of these entries just might get other writers spitting mad:

Realism Take this test. When you read "These dishes have been sitting in the sink for days," do you think (a) This is an indicator of my inner weather, or (b) Why don't they do the dishes? Does the phrase "I'm going as far away from here as my broken transmission will get me, and then I'll take it from there" make you think (a) Somebody understands me, or (b) Why don't they stay and talk it out? What is more visually appealing, (a) a Pall Mall butt floating in a coffee mug, or (b) those new Pop Art place mats in the Crate & Barrel catalog? If you answered (a), do we have a genre for you.

Recommended for: The rumpled, drinky.

I present three incidents totally unrelated to the current business woes of print publications:

1. I renew my longstanding subscription to the New Republic. Two months after the subscription lapses and the check has been cashed, I'm still magazineless. I call customer service and am informed that I should expect a 10 week lag between the processing of a check and the renewal of a subscription. A 10-week lag? I'm trying to imagine the system that produces such a delay. (I may be unwittingly dealing with one of those shady intermediary renewal companies, but still. Why do those still exist?)

2. The Washington Post is sending email to an obsolete address of mine. After much rooting around, I find a FAQ that explains how to fix this. Alas, it directs me to a page with zero relevant information. So I email the address offered for unresolved issues: Questions@washingtonpost.com. The email bounces back; there is no such address, according to the error message. Time well spent!

3. I take a flyer on a loss-leader subscription to Sports Illustrated's golf magazine. (Yeah, I know: golf.) They treat me to this old-school move: they send me a copy of last month's issue and then, a few days later, the current issue. Voila: they've saved themselves 1/12 the cost of a yearly subscription at the small cost of a seething customer! When this happens--and it happens all the time with new subscriptions of every sort--I usually call to get the subscription extended, but this time I don't care enough.

Remember the days when the concept of limited nuclear war was out of favor? As one noted military strategist (Kennan?) put it: "Like Judas of old / You lie and deceive / A world war can be won / You want me to believe."

Escalation would be inevitable, went the argument, so it was better to think in terms of deterrence and mutually assured destruction, aka M.A.D.

In the November/December 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, however, Keir A. Lieber, of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, and Daryl G. Press, a professor of government at Dartmouth, make the case for retaining and maintaining small-yield nuclear weapons that could be deployed in scenarios falling well short of Armageddon. If Iran, for example, used nuclear weapons to destroy a U.S. carrier fleet or other essentially military target (an Army base far from civilian centers, say), and the U.S. had in its arsenal only high-yield bombs, the two scholars write, it would find its hands tied. The world would see the destruction of Tehran as a disproportionate response. And a president might, not unreasonably, be unwilling to sanction the wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Small-to-medium-size atomic weapons that could take out foreign militaries and weapons systems while keeping civilian slaughter to a minimum (or "minimum") are therefore essential to a credible defense, Lieber and Press argue. Otherwise, they write, "U.S. adversaries may conclude--perhaps correctly--that the United States' strategic position abroad rests largely on a bluff."

"Critics may cringe at this analysis," the authors write. "Many of them, understandably, say that nuclear weapons are--and should remain--unusable."

There's an interesting secondary argument running through the article, which is available in full to subscribers only. The United States, these scholars argue, has not been true to its word in some of its wartime negotiations. Saddam Hussein was promised, in 1990, that his regime would survive if he did not use chemical weapons. He did not, yet the U.S. military still set out to kill him and his circle.

Given that precedent--as well as the later fates of Saddam, Milosevic, and other U.S. adversaries in recent years--future military opponents might not be inclined to trust deals aimed at reducing the risks of chemical or nuclear escalation, the Foreign Affairs writers argue.

Goldberg, a reporter and blogger for The Atlantic, thinks that it is beneath the dignity of The Atlantic to interview Gore Vidal. Huh.

Football has an overtime problem, and it knows it. If there's a tie after four quarters, overtime is played in the sudden-death format: the team that scores first wins.

As at the start of the game, initial possession of the ball is determined by a coin toss. But there's where the trouble starts. Unlike at the start of a game, that coin toss often determines the winner. That's because, in overtime, a team needs only to kick a field goal to win, and it's not that hard to get in range for a field-goal try on a first possession.

"From 2000 through 2007, in 37 of the 124 overtime games, the team that won the initial coin toss won on its initial possession," write the Columbia economist Yeon-Koo Che and the Berkeley economist Terrence Hendershott, in the October issue of the online journal The Economists' Voice. Fans would be outraged if games were literally decided by a coin toss, but that's essentially what's happening now.

The commissioner of the NFL once said he'd like to see a ban on winning by a field goal on a first possession in overtime. That awkward solution never went anywhere. But in 2003, a Packers fan and mechanical engineer named Chris Quanbeck pitched a more elegant fix to the league: why not begin overtime with an auction of some kind for field position? The team willing to start closest to its own goal line would get the ball. (Imagine the refs intoning on their booming mics, "Do I hear the 30 yard line? Will anyone take the ball there? Twenty-five? Do I hear twenty? Fifteen?")

In the Economists' Voice, Che and Hendershott present the complex math that demonstrates the soundness of Quanbeck's proposal, and they suggest several variations on the auction theme. Almost any auction-like mechanism would be better than the current system, they say, but some are better than others.

Under one scenario, one team would name a field position and the other team could either accept it or require the first team to take that position. (Not unlike the "You cut, I choose" pie-sharing system.) Under another, both teams would give the refs sealed bids.

Because of what's known to auction theorists as the "winner's curse" (winners of auctions tend to pay slightly more than the object is worth; in this case, teams that won a field-position auction would have sacrificed more than they should have), Che and Hendershott propose a slight alteration to the sealed-bid system. The winner would take up field position that represented the average of the winning and losing bid.

Fans, the economists point out, could have fun on Monday morning second-guessing their coach's bidding strategy, even if their team lost--a lot more fun, anyway, than they'd have bitching about a coin toss.

PS As Che and Hendershott note, Tim Harford, of Slate and the Financial Times, wrote about this paper when it was in draft form.

Query: Baseball officials say they don't want to expand the use of instant replay because it would slow the flow of the game. But how would a quick check of a video screen be any different than that lengthy huddle the umpires engaged in after that fifth inning shoestring catch by the Phillies' shortstop, Jimmy Rollins? Everyone is full of praise for that huddle today, because the umps came up with the right answer. But wouldn't a huddle with the addition of actual relevant data to consider be quicker? Or, at least, cause no more of a delay?

Also, isn't it a bit rich for MLB to be talking about the pace of baseball games at all? There's at least 45 minutes of fat in every game these days: bat-twiddling, dirt-kicking, mound conferences. (Ask your father or grandfather about the days when games would wrap up in under two hours.) Why not crack down on that stuff and, as in football, give the umps some high-tech help, especially when the video evidence is as clear as it was last night.

Here's the opening of a piece in Slate, by Tim Marchman:

To play in the NFL, you have to make a show of going to college. To play in the NBA, you have to get through high school. To sign a contract with a major league baseball team, all you have to do is convince someone you're 16, provided you weren't born in a country with inconvenient labor laws. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining both the high reverence in which the intellectual is held in baseball and the low standards necessary to qualify as one. Mike Mussina's crossword puzzle habit was the telling detail that led a thousand profiles during his long career, limning him as a man apart from the rabble surrounding him in the clubhouse … And Tony La Russa leveraged a never-used J.D. from Florida State University into book-length fawning from both George Will and Buzz Bissinger.

Love it! Marchman goes on to eviscerate Joe Girardi, the Yankee's manager who, as you may have heard from a fawning sportswriter or 20, has an engineering degree from Northwestern. Interestingly, Marchman slams him on the grounds that his decisions are haphazard and illogical, the opposite of what you'd expect from the slide-rule jockey image created by the media.

It's worth pointing out, however--and this has to do with Marchman's lead, not his main argument--that a key reason that college baseball is not corrupt in the same ways as big-time college football and basketball is that the path to MLB is explicitly not tied to education. I've made this point before, to mixed reactions.

The November issue of National Geographic features an extraordinary photograph of a group of chimpanzees watching, evidently in solemn sympathy, as two humans prepare to bury a fallen peer.

The photograph has attracted so much attention--so many links--that National Geographic today, on its web site, offered more information about its origins. The photographer, Monica Szczupider, is a volunteer at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, in Cameroon. She submitted the photograph, taken a year ago, to the magazine as part of a regular contest for amateurs. Realizing what a fine shot they had on their hands, the editors promoted it to the magazine's regular "Visions of Earth" section, which features the best stand-alone photographs the magazine can find.

The simian subject of the shot, Dorothy, died in her late 40s of congestive heart failure. She'd been at the rescue center for eight years, after having worked for 25 years at an amusement park, where she was chained by the neck and taught to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. "As her health improved," writes the magazine's Jeremy Berlin, "her deep kindness surfaced. She mothered an orphaned chimp named Bouboule and became a close friend to many others, including Jacky, the group's alpha male, and Nama, another amusement-park refugee."

The Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, now home to 62 chimps, was founded in 1999 by Sheri Speede, a veterinarian who can be seen cradling Dorothy's head in the picture. Speede was assisted at the burial by Assou Felix, an employee of the center.

Via Dark Roasted Blend

A female ex-writer for the show makes the case, contra Gawker and the longtime Washington Post television critic Tom Shales (who seems particularly blinkered in not seeing the "workplace" aspect of the contretemps).

Looks like I'm not the only one within the Globe's orbit who appreciates the illustrator Ward Sutton. Last week I praised his review of "Where the Wild Things Are" as reimagined by Dave Eggers. This week he's got a savvy take, at Boston.com, on the reception of the song "Born in the U.S.A.," a dark tune whose anthemic tone led to numerous misreadings. ("Born in the U.S.A," the album, is a quarter-century old this year, but the song itself is older, as Sutton discusses.)

George Will, among others, proved himself to be no Greil Marcus when it came to interpreting lyrics: "I have not a clue about his politics … but flags get waved at his concerts … punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: 'Born in the U.S.A.!'" Cheerful?

Though I agree with Sutton that the album's lyrics are, for the most part, undermined by the happy-synth treatment, the song "Born in the U.S.A." never sounds anything but bleak to me, the chorus the very definition of double-edged. And listen to how raw the vocals are in the verses. But Sutton's overall argument that Springsteen deserves blame for the album's confused reception is pretty hard to dispute.

Feel like showing up that neighbor who rubs his eco-conscientiousness in your face with that smart-ass, wedge-like Prius, yet also feel that the Hummer is 1) showing its age; 2) watered down by smaller, plebeian iterations like the H3; and 3) somewhat less manly after the shift in ownership to an obscure Chinese company? If so, your vehicle may have arrived.

A Russian armored-car builder, Dartz, has announced a four-ton, four-wheel-drive armored vehicle that can withstand a grenade-launcher attack yet does not sacrifice luxury in the persuit of security. The truck's bullet-proof windows are gold-plated, its exhaust pipes fashioned of tungsten, the gauges encrusted with diamonds and other jewels.

In the pièce de resistance (or something), the seats of the Prombron Monaco Red Diamond Edition will be covered with what the company describes as "whale-penis leather." According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Dartz web site boasts that this is the same material that Aristotle Onassis used to cover the barstools in his yacht Christina O.

The company supposedly plans to introduce the $1.6 million vehicle at a luxury-auto show in Monaco next year. No word on whether it is headed for the U.S. market, or on gas mileage, but buyers will get three bottles of very expensive vodka, gratis.

Writes Philip Kennicott, a culture critic, on his blog:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who once lamented that overturning a law criminalizing homosexuality might lead to the invalidation of laws criminalizing masturbation, adultery and fornication, received a little lap dance on Saturday night.

I am journalistically obliged, I suppose, to include the next sentence: "Location: The Washington National Opera." Scalia and other Justices have long been known to show up at (and even in) WNO performances.

Earlier this month, Kennicott reported from the Gramophone Awards, in London, reporting that among his biggest disappointments was the judges' failure to honor the Boston Early Music Festival:

I was rooting for the Boston Early Music Festival's recording of Lully's Psyché, really a remarkable accomplishment, to win in the Baroque Vocal category. Festival by festival, the Boston players get stronger and more cohesive, and their track record of opera on disk is something that deserves wider and higher recognition.

(Photo: Karin Cooper, for the Washington National Opera)