You totally have to go buy tickets to Kristin Hersh’s night next week at the 92Y Tribeca before it sells out! That is soon! She’s going to be like chatting and reading and singing songs!

It feels crazy and ridiculous to be typing the news that MC Hammer has a new song and video out dissing Jay-Z. Even though we got word that it was coming in September, after Jay made reference to Hammer’s famous early-’90s bankruptcy on a verse from the Kanye West posse cut, “So Appalled.” (This year had already been a big year for Hammer, what with a Rick Ross hit named after him and everything.) Hammer took to calling Jay “Hell Boy” on his Twitter account (a reference to the entertaining notion that the world’s biggest rap star is in league with the occult — Hammer is an ordained minister) and vowed Halloween-time revenge.

Now that it’s here, though, it’s all even crazier and more ridiculous than I might have imagined.

The video begins in the corporate offices of Alchemist MMA Management firm in Denver, Colorado, where Hammer, the owner of the company, drops by to visit his team as they discuss a clothing line they’re launching. (I guess? “MMA” stands for “Mixed Martial Arts,” so this the clothes will be mixed martial arts wear?) The president of the company is looking at a computer and Hammer asks him if the screen is equipped with 3-D technology. It is apparently, and the president shows off the 3-D glasses he uses to look at it. One of the other executives is wearing wrap-around shades on the back of his head. Hammer is on the phone the whole time, and apparently gets one call alerting him to some serious news that he’s going to have to handle. (The news that Jay-Z has mentioned him on record, we presume.) ONE MINUTE AND TWENTY SECONDS OF THIS PASSES BEFORE THE MUSIC STARTS.

When the music does finally start, we see a heavy-set Jay-Z (identifiable mostly by his trademark New York Yankees cap, pulled low on his brow) behind a campfire. Then Jay is running through the woods (I’m telling you, this the THE hot trend in rap videos!) being chased by a small trick-or-treater in a devil’s costume.

Then there’s some good dancers dancing in front of klieg lights. Then Hammer raps in a bespangled vintage Aerosmith t-shirt. Or maybe it’s a Harley-Davidson t-shirt? Or, no, it’s probably from the Alchemist clothing line. That would make more sense. Hammer says he can tell Jay-Z sold his soul to the devil.

Then Hammer dances with the dancers. Then he’s wearing a white suit with a Nehru collar and sitting in front of the campfire. Then he trains for boxing (or, I suppose, mixed martial arts) with one of his executives.

Meanwhile, the devil keeps chasing Jay through the forest. This is deep American folk archetype stuff. Like Greil Marcus wrote about Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” in Mystery Train. God, what an awesome song that is. Watch this amazing video from 1973:

Okay, back in the Hammer video, Hammer burns some of Jay-Z’s Rocawear clothes in the campfire and accuses Jay of trying to steal his swag. (That part is really funny.) Then we see Hammer standing solemnly by a placid lake, treetops and clouds reflected in the glassy surface. The Jay-Z is sitting in the studio, writing lyrics. The devil comes up and sits next to him and nods his head. Jay-Z writes some lyrics in a notebook (also funny, because Jay-Z is very famous for never writing his lyrics down.) He writes, “Jesus can’t save U!”

Then the devil chases Jay-Z past where Hammer is standing beside the lake. Jay runs by looking almost out of breath, and Hammer hold out his hand and STOPS the devil!

Then the song ends and Jay and Hammer are alone by the lake. It’s dusk, and the sounds of the insects in the forest surround them. Hammer is talking to Jay, gesticulating forcefully, but Jay seems reluctant to listen. He’s stubborn. So Hammer puts one hand on Jay’s shoulder and the other on his chest and pushes him backwards into the lake. Jay falls into the water with a loud splash. Hammer has baptized him!

Crazy, right? And ridiculous!

Sure, there’s plenty of destruction in this video of a Georgia hail storm, but it’s also somehow very soothing. But that may just be me; I’m in sort of a mood.

“Congress is a funny, insular place. Mastering it the way Pelosi did is an art that is much more a liability than an asset with voters. Her outspokenness, her unapologetic liberalism, and — yes — her gender, made her a rich target for Republicans, especially when the economy collapsed. But she refused to back down.”
 — Steve Kornacki writes Nancy Pelosi’s political obituary.

Chelsea Handler’s Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea is getting a pilot at NBC. That book is a memoir of her time before she began dating the CEO of Comcast. One blog commenter responded: “Chelsea is the funniest woman alive! Her talk show makes all the others seem irrelevant. Perhaps she can now save the world of network sitcoms!!!! Great move by NBC!!!!” In other news, HBO is doing a pilot for Molly Shannon in which she plays a nun leaving the convent.

Not only are the facts and premise of the documentary Waiting for Superman not at all right, but now we learn that at least one scene was staged for the film. This touching scene from the documentary (the overall storyline of which is: poor people desperately yearning to get into charter and private schools), in which a mother first tours the Harlem Success Academy and oohs and ahs, was actually staged after her child was rejected. Here’s the director, Davis Guggenheim, telling the Times about that: “So that scene is real; her reaction, her talking to kids touring the school, is how she would play it.” So that… scene… is real… it’s how she would play it. That’s remarkable!

“President Barack Obama makes an election night phone call to Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) from his Treaty Room office in the White House residence a couple of minutes after midnight, Nov. 3, 2010.”

by Seth Colter Walls

There will be plenty of political eulogies forthcoming on behalf of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Anyone Who Cared About the Influence of Money in Politics and Oh Sure, Civil Liberties, Too). This won’t be one, precisely — or at least not a eulogy on behalf of his politics. If you were forced to adopt the standard pose of a central-casting “secular progressive,” sure, you’d admit Feingold’s defeat hurts more than most of the others dealt out last night by the hydra-headed beast that was Congressional Bloodbath XXVII: The Inchoate Reckoning. (Republicans won the anti-banker vote? [Whistles, moves on.])

But let’s think about Feingold for a moment, instead of ourselves.

Forget all the things he stood for — those lonely votes against the Iraq War resolution and the Patriot Act (yes, even TARP, from the left). The other thing to remember here is that, really and truly, this guy did not dig Washington. If there’s a silver lining for those who care about the man, it’s that now he gets to go home for a while, to a state he genuinely loves, as he figures out what to do next.

He’ll regret being absent from the next Pakistan briefing in the Senate’s select Committee on Intelligence, though it’s next to impossible to think of him missing the other status “perks” that reduce other Senators to the grinning little boys they (mostly) are. (I once saw Ted Stevens presenting an overall mien strikingly similar to that of a delighted toddler, while he rode the rinky-dink rail line underneath the Capitol building. He had recently been indicted on seven felony counts by a federal grand jury.)

Feingold had this long-running line with political reporters, about his wife calling him “Mr. Excitement” because of “all the naps it takes to keep this thing going.” I first read it in the Progressive magazine back in 2002, and so I recognized it when he also used it on me — minus the wife part — in 2008, after his second marriage had busted up. Point is, the guy was in Washington to actually do the work. Did you ever see Feingold beaming with unearned pride as one of the three presidents he served alongside was handing out those stale candies of recognition — “Hey, so you’re also here tonight! Suck on this!” — at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner? No, you did not. According to Sanford Horwitt’s biography of Feingold, the Senator also forbade his staff from even accepting free tickets to the charity dinner — from journalists, even! Here’s another good anecdote from Horwitt’s book, in which a staffer recalls one late night on the Hill.

I remember going late at night to some committee meeting — we were cleaning up a bill. I walked in, and they had Chinese food. They asked if I wanted some. I said, “Did you buy this? I’m not allowed to accept something except if it’s from another staff person.” The laughed and said, “Don’t worry; we ordered it. You [Feingold] guys are such pains in the butt.” So I took an egg roll. And after I ate it, they started laughing. It was actually sent by some restaurant association or some lobbying group. They were just cracking up. “You’re contaminated,” they said. “Taking food from lobbyists.” So I took a dollar out and laid it on the table. “Here’s my dollar for my egg roll,” I said. It was an interesting illustration… of how it was a threat to their culture.

For all the anti-DC talk you hear from politicos, most of them can’t get enough of the place. The diagonally slicing arterial avenues are just larded with dudes in khaki pants and gold-buttoned blue blazers who, pre-Pelosi ethics rules, couldn’t cram down enough lobbyist-purchased steaks at the charmlessly wood-panelled wine n’ dine joints for which the district is so famous. You know how, yesterday, Politico’s honchos bemoaned the state of distraction-driven political culture? Yeah, it’s like that with politicians who campaign against Washington. Most of these people are having fun there.

At any rate, I have no idea what Sen. Feingold was like with members of Wisconsin’s press. Based on the fact that all of the state’s major papers — liberal and conservative alike — endorsed him this time around, my guess is he could turn on the charm when he wanted. But Feingold treated talking to national political reporters — or, er, at least me — like it was total drudge work. It was pretty funny. You’d ask him a set-up question about his pet issue, just an opening for him to tee off on (and also so you could introduce all the arcane acronyms, like FISA and PAA, to your readers at once). And then you could just hear it in his voice. The, “oh God, this is pretty elementary” or “I hope this doesn’t get dumbed down super hard.”

He also rarely lingered after the few think tank talks he was invited to give. Though, as a reporter, you could sometimes meet really interesting people in his audiences. (Including, one time, an ex-CIA op from the Tenet era who had come because, like, Feingold actually knew things.) I never took Feingold’s sort of chilly shoulder personally. But I could also see how such a firm no-bullshit attitude at all times would make life hard in DC.

Another attribute that came through really clearly, whenever you asked him about the near-term political implications of something, was how the Senator was playing a different game from everyone else. Aside from times when simple obstructionism is the strategy, most legislators will drop a fight once it’s clear a loss is inevitable. I asked Feingold, on one occasion, why he was even bothering to offer amendments on a bill when he knew the only reason his amendments had been allowed to the floor was that they were sure to fail.

“We’re trying to make a record here, and to show who voted for what,” he said. “My prediction is this thing will go through; it will be challenged and go through the courts. And eventually a Supreme Court with something like seven Republican-appointed judges will strike down the worst parts of it. This is a long-term battle to protect the rights of the American people.”

So: a guy like that served 18 years in the United States Senate. There’s not really much else to say about the fact that he couldn’t secure a fourth term, other than to post this video from one of the colleagues he’ll leave behind on that body’s committee on all things judicial in nature.

Seth Colter Walls is The Awl’s chief correspondent for the difficult arts. He used to write about politics all the damn time.

This is an actual sentence in a news story about the thrice-elected leader of a European nation: “A teenage belly dancer given €7,000 and a diamond necklace by Silvio Berlusconi has revealed the Italian PM has a marble statue of himself as Superman.”

I don’t see why anyone would not. Last week at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington D.C., zookeepers dropped four eight-week-old baby lions into a pool to make sure they’d be safe and comfortable when they’re moved to the pen where they’ll live, which is surrounded by a nine-foot moat. Everything seems to have worked out fine. And since the cubs have apparently yet to be named — they are identified in the Smithsonian’s video only as “First Cub,” “Second Cub,” etc. — I have decided to name them based on their performances.

First Cub (female) = Drippy
Second Cub (female) = Soggy
Third Cub (Male) = Whiney
Fourth Cub (Female) = Michaela Phelps