Zelensky’s Grammy speech was rather good — morally urgent, concisely written, well delivered, presumably rehearsed. Did the Oscars blow him off? If so, they shouldn’t have.

The Focus marketing team sat down and decided that the title doesn’t mean much — no one will remember it, they’re thinking, certainly when it comes to NYC subway riders — it’s the Viking vibe, the beards, the long hair, the axes, the wounds, the grayness and grimness.

I have this idea that “Pretty Ballerina” is kind of timeless. Okay, maybe not but it feels like a close relation of a 21st Century Emo song. If it had never been recorded and released several decades ago but if someone current had recorded it in precisely this baroque way, would it fit right in or would your music cognoscenti go “the fuck?”

HE to Jett: “If this song was released today, would it fit in as a kind of EMO thing?”
Jett to HE: “It would be more indie pop-rock. Not really Emo by today’s standards.”
HE to Jett: “What is it missing Emo-wise? I thought EMO was defined by a kind of whiny feeling…a soft emotional core.”
Jett to HE: “Emo is just more over-the-top these days, lyrically and production-wise.”
HE to Jett “Ballerina has strings, a falsetto singing voice, a feeling of longing.”
Jett to HE: “That’s fine but Emo is a subculture that’s completely detached from this.”
HE to Jett: “Detached from what? Good lyric writing?”
Jett to HE: “I’m not saying Pretty Ballerina is bad. It’s just not Emo. Today’s Emo is hyper-pop. You’d hate it.”

From The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody: “During the New York press junket for the film Morituri, in 1965, its star, Marlon Brando, received a series of journalists for brief interviews at a table in the Hampshire House hotel and toyed with them gleefully and mercilessly.

“This 1966 documentary, by Albert and David Maysles, captures Brando’s transformation of the setup, through the sheer force of his personality, into a grandly ironic variety of performance art.

“Brando brazenly flirts with several female journalists, complimenting them on their appearance, and aggressively questions male interviewers about their looks, too (with particular attention to their fingernails and their clothing). Challenging the interviewers’ readiness to act as ‘hucksters,’ Brando mocks the blatantly promotional conversations with sly or flamboyant sarcasm and disarmingly sincere reflections.

“In a streetside interview, Brando speaks French with a French interviewer, and in response to a political question about the circumstances of black people in the United States, he beckons to a black woman who’s passing by and poses the question to her. The resulting portrait of Brando — sexual, intellectual, aggressive, vulnerable, seductive, rebellious — shows him creating a greater character than any ever written for him: himself.”