Jay-Z just topped Forbes list of “Hollywood’s Top-Earning Couples,” pulling in a cool $122 million with wife Beyonce from June 2008 to June 2009. He so totally sold his soul to the devil!

Actually, the vigilant citizens at Rap Radar have collected denials from the principals involved with the video, for Jay’s new single “On To the Next One,” that got all those crazy Illuminati theories buzzing.

First, the video’s director Ron Brown, from an interview with Vibe:

I’m aware of the stir the video has caused and what people are saying. I think when you’re dealing in abstract imagery people are going to want to draw lines between things and make sense of it. However, I’ve always felt that the viewing public was, in general, extremely visually literate. They don’t always want or need things to be spelt out for them. One of the great things about music videos are they can be enjoyed purely visually-it doesn’t need to mean anything or make any sense. Conspiracy theory is another thing entirely, and seems to me to be about projecting pre-existing beliefs and desperately looking for things that confirm them. There is imagery in this video that is drawn from all over the place. None of it is owned by any one culture or belief system. You can connect anything if you try hard enough, and make it mean anything you want it to.

Next, the song’s producer, Swizz Beats, on MTV News:

I don’t think about that. I know that’s a billion percent not true. The video displays another level of art and creativity from two great minds: the director and Jay-and myself, bringing the collaboration together. It’s no satanic ways around me and that’s for sure. I’m with Jay-I never see none of that stuff around him unless he’s hiding something, which I doubt. C’mon, man. That’s silly stuff. That stuff you don’t even comment on; we on to the next one.

Lastly, Jay himself, during an interview yesterday with current tour mates Young Jeezy and Trey Songz and Hot 97’s Angie Martinez:

I really think it’s really silly. For the record, I of course believe in God. I believe in one god. If people must know my religious beliefs, I believe in one god. I don’t believe in religions. I don’t believe in Christians or Muslims. I think that separates people. I think its one god, I think it’s all the same god, and I don’t believe in hell. But as far as God, of course I believe in God. Am I a part of some type of sect or cult? That sounds stupid to me. It’s like ignorant to even say. And I guess that’ll be the last time I address that.

Angie: Are there little secret societies?

Yeah, right here. This is The Mob Squad. Roc Nation is the gang. But, I can’t even get in the golf club in Palm Springs. I’m from Marcy Projects. Imagine… Just think about that-

Angie: They wouldn’t let you in the club, you’re saying?

Of course not. How? People that control the world…

Angie: Do you believe that those sort of organizations exist?

I think there’s cliques of friends that control things. I don’t know if it’s a devil worshiping sect. I think that’s a little Tom Hanks. But I believe there’s cliques of people that control the world. Y’know, Jeezy’s my man that got Atlanta, I go down to Atlanta, I got that thing. He come to Brooklyn, I got that thing. Go down to Virginia, y’know. But that’s just natural process. I’m sure Obama has his people that, everything is good.

So there you have it. No secret societies for Jay-Z. Of course, maybe it’s just that now that the Freemasons are so much less exclusive, he wouldn’t even want the company.

“Folks had good knowledge of the content of the urine going in, but the chemistry changes as it works through the processor are not always understood. There are a lot of parameters including urine calcium and pH (acidity) that everyone is looking at.”
-NASA scientist Julie Robinson explains the problem with the International Space Station’s water recycling system. The system, which converts astronaut urine into a potable liquid, has experienced damaging clogs due to the urine’s high calcium content, which may be a result of “bone loss, a consequence of living in a zero-gravity environment, or other factors.”

How serious is Harold Ford about becoming New York’s newest official money-launderer? So serious that he’ll actually work the room at Michael’s. This will not end well (for us).

Teddy Pendergrass, one of the great voices of Philadelphia soul music, has died at age 59, of colon cancer. Starting out on the drums, Pendergrass emerged to sing lead for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes from 1970 to 1976, a cornerstone in the empire of superproducers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, before launching a solo career that banked heavily on his sex appeal. Pendergrass sang in a wheelchair after a 1982 car crash left him paralyzed from the waist down. ‘’He used to say something in his act in the wheelchair,” said Gamble, in eulogy. “’Don’t let the wheelchair fool you.’ Because he still proclaimed he was a lover.”

Have you been following the special election in Massachusetts to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate? It has become something of a flashpoint in the last couple of weeks, with Republicans trumpeting their candidate, Scott Brown, as having a better-than-usual chance to win in Democratic Massachusetts, and thus destroy health care reform. My personal feeling is that the whole thing is a lot of wishful thinking from people who live in an echo chamber where the whole world is one big “Tea Party” movement ready to “take back America,” and that Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee, is going to win no matter what, but special elections are notoriously hard to call and Coakley has run an absolutely awful campaign, so I could be wrong. You never know! Anyway, Gail Collins, who has been completely energized over the last six months, takes a look at the race today and includes a great rant about the super-majority in the Senate that is well worth your time.

Haitian Pact With The Devil: A Clarification

Pat Robertson’s ability to use any natural disaster as the springboard for a provocative and deeply ignorant remark that expresses his own blinkered and bigoted worldview of “morality” is so commonplace and predictable by this point that it usually seems unworthy of noting. His comment yesterday about Haiti having caused its own massive tragedy by making “a pact with the devil” falls well within this category, and ordinarily I’d ignore it, but this response by Haitian ambassador Raymond Joseph is so perfect-direct, intelligent, filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening-that it deserves as much currency as it can get. It’s a shame that we live in a world where something like this is both necessary and remarkable, but there you are.

by Luke Mazur

Maybe some of that $15 million Columbia University just received for a center devoted to digital journalism can be used to figure out why there are, as of now, two Jersey Shore posts here on this website, over the course of just two days. The same grant can pay someone to parse how Avatar, Katie Roiphe’s favorite authors and pop sociology intersect with any of this. Until then, let me do my part.

We know, from reading Newsweek, and from looking around, that our institutions and communities are eroding.

We’re not regulating or joining bowling leagues as much as the generations before us have. My grandmother Genevieve used to play cards with her mostly Polish-speaking friends all the time. They were active in the local Republican politics-way back when Republicans and any political party would have considered use of the word “Negro” polite. And though I never met my dad’s dad, I assume that as the son of Polish immigrants living in Buffalo, NY, Alois got to some bowling alleys.

Avatar expounded on this notion that our real-life communities are disintegrating. But the movie also offered that we’re plugging into virtual reality, at least in part, to interact with vast new worlds. Hence my dad announces when he has reached 100 Twitter followers and my mom logs into Yahoo to manage her fantasy football league. To be sure, underpinning my dad’s tweeting and my mom’s fantasies are weak social bonds. But gone for good are the tattooed ties to a country your ancestors moved from 100 years ago. Gone is the group-building that grows out of the casual use of derogatory words.

Except, it seems, at the Jersey shore? Italian-American groups have criticized MTV for airing the program, arguing that it feeds off of and perpetuates negative stereotypes. And, wow. The series revels in the tics, the lexicon, and the wardrobe that give the cast its identity. What’s more, the cast members seem to revel in them too; a recent Funny or Die video starring Snooki, Pauly D and the The Situation in which they flip on and off their accents suggests as much.

But not everything down on the shore is pretense. The seven roommates dine together and say grace together like any pre-Bowling Alone, pre-Internet family would. When Sammi refuses to wash the dinner dishes one night, The Situation demeans her mean-spiritedly, and in the manner that only a younger sister could excuse. On Sunday mornings, their actual moms (who double as their actual roommates) wake them up with trays of baked ziti. There’s something at once anachronistic and communal and magnetic about the whole bit.

Fifty some years ago, Neil Klugman found himself plunged inside the world of Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks. Because Philip Roth wrote Goodbye, Columbus, it is heady and emotionally complicated and lyrical. And very much unlike a summer on the Shore, Neil’s summer involved a diaphragm and a Harvard student.

On the last page of the novella, Klugman rejects the wealthy Brenda and her assimilated suburban goyishe lifestyle in exchange for old world Newark, where he lives with his thickly-accented, oh-so-ethnic aunt. He arrives back in Newark “just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year.” And as such, Roth tapped into the pull of a subculture where provincialism trumps the way we live now. Does that situation sound familiar?

Snooki’s not Jewish. But her heart is still half a prophet. (That’s a Yiddish proverb inscribing Goodbye, Columbus.) And her show, with a bit of a stretch and a bit more Yiddish, well, it could be The Jersey Shtetl. Maybe?

Luke Mazur is still allegedly our grammar columnist. He still does his best thinking on his parents’ couch.

Obviously death toll news is beside the point in Haiti. For the record, though, Haiti’s president is now, sort of, putting forward a number: “I don’t know… up to now, I heard 50,000 … 30,000.” Relatedly, I am willing to forgive Max Blumenthal’s seriously irksome Twitter posting last night (“I’m hearing casualty estimates of 1 mil.”) because his complex 2004 story on Haiti and the U.S. is absolutely worth a fresh read now. As is Naomi Klein’s 2005 piece on Aristide. (See also: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)

Oh hey! The Idiocracy has happened! We found the proof in this (NSFW) video from Spike TV’s new “TV show” that actually exists. It is about straight guys eating things that have been in their butts and laughing at each other, and it is a TV show, on the actual TV, it seems.

This is very dreamy. Though she participated in her lawyer-boss’s (alleged!) hiding of fees, once he became a total schmuck, this secretary narced him out hard. The motivation?

[The secretary] said she started getting the cold shoulder in 1999 after she refused to take time from a busy schedule to do some work for Gross’ wife, Heidi Gross, a lawyer in the firm. There were other incidents, one of which ended with Gross calling her a “fucking idiot,” McCarthy told the disciplinarians.

In 2002, not long after Gross scrawled “no” across her vacation request and threw it into a wastebasket, McCarthy told members of the firm about the 1998 check.