Set your Tivo

You Madisonians, be watching the WB 57 "Nine O'clock News" on Friday, March 18, because my band, the World's Greatest Lovers, will be playing their unique brand of honkytonk on the show that night.

Another coincidence

In addition to Hotel Rwanda, last weekend I also caught up with Tarnation, the devastating autobiographical documentary about a young man and his troubled family. (It takes a while for some films to make it to Madison.) I liked it, and I was pleasantly--if that's the right word--surprised when a montage prominently featured tape of the filmmaker, Jonathan Caouette, as an adolescent lipsyncing to the song "Frank Mills" from Hair.

I was surprised because Ereck had introduced me to that song only weeks earlier, when we were driving to Tennessee for the holidays. We were listening to the cast recording of Hair, most of which I'd never heard, and he suggested I brace myself for "Frank Mills." Nothing could have prepared me: the song, sung sweetly by Shelley Plimpton, is a brief, deceptively simple vignette about a Brooklyn boy she loves. It's arresting and heartbreaking, and very different from the rest of the album. In the truck that day I couldn't stop playing the song over and over, and I couldn't stop weeping. Yesterday I got to thinking about it again, and I listened to it twenty or so more times, and sang along--and couldn't stop weeping.

Turns out I'm not the only one who digs that song!

Good word

"And further, I don't understand how you can spend $30 million to cover Central Park in shower curtains."

--David Letterman

Beep beep

Anyone who was a child in the 1970s will not be able to suppress a grin when they learn Disney is reviving the Herbie the Love Bug franchise, especially if they learn from this poster, as I did at the movie theater last night. The film will star not 1970s Disney trouper Ken Berry but 2000s Disney trouper Lindsay Lohan.

The probability is 99.9 percent, repeating, that the film will suck. But that is one dynamite poster.

Moving picture

I finally caught up with Hotel Rwanda on Sunday, and I'm glad.

Stephen Holden in the New York Times called it a political thriller, but that doesn't seem quite right, if a political thriller is a film like All the President's Men or The Manchurian Candidate. Certainly Hotel Rwanda has politics and is thrilling, not in a good way, but All the President's Men didn't make me hyperventilate in fear and anxiety.

I'd classify Hotel Rwanda as a horror film, and not only because it depicts horrific events. The film's structure resembles virtually every horror movie--more precisely, every zombie movie--since Night of the Living Dead: the bad people want to kill us, and they're closing in, and we can't stop them. (And as in every modern horror film, a few lucky people get away at the end.)

I don't say this to trivialize the film, which is as important a film about the Rwandan genocide as The Killing Fields was about the Cambodian genocide. If anything, I think this taxonomy says a lot about why horror movies can be so effective: It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes--in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Poland--the zombies really are closing in, and they really do want to kill us.

Bow wow wow

Ereck and I have developed a case of puppy love from watching the Westminster dog show and, last weekend, the American Kennel Club show. Of course, the puppy love is unrequited at this point, since our rental lease doesn't let us keep a dog. But it's fun to talk about.

We agreed a while back that a medium-sized dog would be best. It was a logical compromise: I like bigger dogs--setters, retrievers--and Ereck likes small ones. My pickup truck, Red Boy, is named for an Irish setter I loved a lot when I was a kid.

So we meditated for a while on the Brittany. Then I met one, and she was heartbreakingly gorgeous, but she also was the most hyperactive pooch I've ever encountered. Her owner told me this was par for the course. Seems like a lot to deal with.

We've now turned to the Welsh Springer spaniel, similar to the Brittany but, my sources tell me, calmer. I also could be convinced to get a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, just like Charlotte's on "Sex and the City."

Big smiles

I'm delighted Alicia Keys won all those Grammys. Her album Diary of Alicia Keys was one of my favorites last year, especially its singles "You Don't Know My Name" and "If I Ain't Got You," both of which got Grammy nods. She has a great, earthy singing voice and, unlike so many of her contemporaries, does not go in for excessive, "American Idol"-type melisma. (In that regard she's the anti-Beyonc�, not that I'm necessarily opposed to Beyonc�.)

She's also got terrific taste in songs. "If I Ain't Got You" is a fabulously old-school soul tune, with a horn track that could be straight from an Al Green side on Hi Records. And "You Don't Know My Name" blew me into the stratosphere when I first heard it, especially because of its deliciously over-the-top spoken section ("Hold on, my cell phone breakin' up"), perhaps the best spoken section in a pop song since Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You."