The Supremes Sing Rodgers & Hart: The Complete Collection (Motown) - Not what I wanted. In dreams I imagined Motown dragging the factory pop of another era (never mind the actual dates) back to its proper place in rock 'n' roll. Rockers have always preferred to think of themselves as the children of primal R&B and country: howling, feral, unbounded id. Elvis' admiration for Dean Martin was just a confusing, or at least cute, anomaly until years later the rockers could appreciate Martin through the haze of irony and camp. By then they were further away than ever. They prefer not to understand that when Jerry Lee says Al Jolson was one of the three great stylists that he was dead serious.
The Supremes showed up--if I remember correctly--to meet the Beatles with a chaperone. Were they rock, rock 'n' roll, pop, R&B, who cares? These songs are, at times, great songs and the Supremes could have done justice by them if only they weren't so comfortable playing dress-up in Mommy's clothes, which is creepy mainly because they're not children. Instead of Motown horns, tepid big-band charts; instead of three women singing as if they should own the world, tentative voices asking "Do you like me?"
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Greil Marcus Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000) - Nope, hadn't read it before, maybe because I'd read most of the pieces when they were first published. It's mostly great of course and as a special bonus gave Christopher Hitchens a hissy fit.
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The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (Woody Allen 2001) - Silly premise artfully designed to support a feature-length monologue, half of it delivered by Allen and half given to Helen Hunt.
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Jean-Michel Mension The Tribe (1998, English translation 2001) - The back cover helpfully notes "Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time, Vol. 1" but this is barely a footnote. A book-length (a short book but a book nonetheless) interview with Mension it's actually more about the Lettrists than the Situationists and really more about some of Mension's buddies than either movement. Perhaps the intent was to place these now dauntingly abstract thinkers (they're not but that's the perception) back into their everyday environments. But since according to The Tribe they did little more than shoplift and consume prodigous quantities of alcohol and hash, there's not much of a connection to be drawn. What did they talk about? What did they read? Did they completely avoid other art? Other political groups? Dunno. But if The National Equirer ever turns its gaze onto the Situationists, here's where it will start.
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I'd heard great things about an anthology put out by The Comics Journal (I think the title is actually the date: Winter 2002). But in the store this turns out to be about 14 inches long and 10 inches high and fairly thin; in other words it won't fit properly beside anything else on a shelf and even worse the large, insubstantial size means it will definitely be damaged at some point. Naturally I didn't buy it. Why should I encourage bad design?