I kind of aged out of “liking new things” a few years back and, as a consequence, stopped caring before I was able to make concrete distinctions between the Black Lips and the Black Keys, which means now I can never keep them straight in my head. So just to be on the safe side, here is something from each of them. If there are other bands with the Black Something in their names let me know and I will iterate this post. [Via] (NB: I will not iterate this post, I am “having a little fun” with the idea of iteration.)

“A Staten Island woman was arrested for running over one of her neighbor’s hens with her car, kicking the dead bird and stuffing a cigarette in its mouth for a series of pictures, according to court documents.”

“Last week the reclusive singer-songwriter Kate Bush announced that she would play 15 shows in London between Aug. 26 and Sept. 19 — her first extended run of performances since her single tour of Britain in 1979, at the start of her career. Fascination with Ms. Bush, and the prospect of seeing her — the 1979 shows were lavishly staged and choreographed, and her music since then has retained its inventiveness and mystique — was sufficient to crash her website almost instantly. She quickly added another seven shows at the 3,500-seat Eventim Apollo, extending the run to Oct. 1. Tickets, priced at £49 to £135 (about $81.50 to $225.50) — with hospitality packages that include premium seats and a picnic for £424.50 ($706) — went on sale on Friday at 9:30 a.m., London time, and within 15 minutes, the 77,000 seats for the 22 shows were sold out.”

You kind of hope that Mayor de Blasio is making his public gesture of contrition on the issue of charter schools because he realizes that he has so many things on his plate that a drawn-out battle with well-funded opponents who have the benefit of compliant allies in the press willing to discredit progressive politics by any means necessary would be a massive distraction from his goals at this very crucial stage of his term and that he is actually saying conciliatory things right now to take the issue off the table so that later, when the public attention span inevitably shifts to other, more important issues, he can swiftly eviscerate these cancers under the cover of darkness, but some days that feels like a lot to wish for.

Hmm: “Cats have passed TB to humans for the first time in an outbreak feared to have been caused by badgers. Two people from the same household are being treated for bovine tuberculosis after they caught the disease from their kitten. Two other cat owners have been infected with a dormant form of TB.”

Oh, and recently: “Using deliberately conservative assumptions, federal researchers recently estimated that free-ranging cats killed about 2.4 billion birds annually in the Lower 48 states, a substantial bite out of the total bird population. Outdoor cats also kill about 12.3 billion small mammals a year — not just the proverbial rats and mice but also chipmunks, rabbits and squirrels — and about 650 million reptiles and amphibians. In some cases, they are pushing endangered species toward extinction.”

Now, I am not saying that we need to permanently quarantine both cats and the people who take them into their homes as a preventative measure to keep them from spreading their disease and murder to the rest of us, so I am not sure why that idea is even in your head. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that we keep cats and cat owners on lockdown inside their shitbox-intensive domiciles for the benefit of the birds and also all of the human beings who have chosen not to harbor vectors for tuberculosis and worse, so it seems weird that you would even bring it up. I am simply sharing a couple of things that have been in the news lately, and if the conclusion you draw from it is that we need to keep cats and cat people away from the general population immediately, like before we get to the weekend even, that is surely something you have come up with on your own and I don’t know that I can fully endorse it. Although it is a pretty intriguing idea, the one you have about home confinement for cats and cat owners. Tell me more!

“I was irate. In a place like Park Slope, it’s culturally insensitive.”

Noah is getting the strangest good reviews. “I’m not sure who exactly this often grimly rapturous movie was made for, but I find myself surprisingly glad that it was made,” wrote Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. A.O. Scott went with: “Mr. Aronofsky’s earnest, uneven, intermittently powerful film, is both a psychological case study and a parable of hubris and humility. At its best, it shares some its namesake’s ferocious conviction, and not a little of his madness.”

These are all incredibly charitable. This is not a good movie. I wanted to bite off my fingers. From the opening sequence, which explains the silly state of the world and some fallen angels by means of text that looks suspiciously like the unholy Papyrus font, to the senseless howling and weeping and gnashing of teeth and stomping around that proceeds over the next two hours, Noah looks all around like a film gone seriously wrong. In terms of emotional pitch, it makes Black Swan look like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s tiresome, exhausting, bizarre and self-serious. Aronofsky is pretty close to being a great director who’s never actually made a great film.

In anyone else’s hands, the story of grim old stick-in-the-mud Russell Crowe saving the beasts of the world from the evils of men would be extremely camp. And there are times that the movie looks like claymation or the performances turn just a bit too histrionic. But there’s never anything laughable, really — ever — in even Aronofsky’s most ridiculous situations. That’s what makes Noah so tiring. And yet… visually captivating? I guess the upside is, it’s refreshing to see a movie where you literally cannot imagine what will happen, even though you assume there’s going to be, like, a big flood, and an eventual yacht collision with Mount Ararat.

I always start to suspect that it all goes wrong with his collaborators. Noah has the wonderful Clint Mansell’s worst score to date (and I say this as a huge, huge Mansell fan), and Aronofsky’s stuck by his production designer and editor from Black Swan and his costume designer back to The Wrestler. But that’s not it: they all do great work over and over. Thérèse DePrez also did the impeccable production designs for Stoker and I Shot Andy Warhol and Happiness, and Amy Westcott did costumes for The Squid and the Whale and “Entourage” and the delightful What’s Your Number? (She has the craziest job of all here: “pretend there was actually a first iron age before the one we know about and also there were magical animals and angels and stuff and they’d discovered indigo dye and invented really sophisticated looms but nothing else.” You end up with a kind of Bottega Veneta as reimagined by al Qaeda members.) Likewise Noah’s editor did Moonrise Kingdom, The East and Fantastic Mr. Fox. So everything wrong with this movie is Aronofsky’s fault.

From the east coast, this looks like the insanely expensive end of Darren Aronofsky, with the production budget plus the marketing budget teetering quickly towards $200 million. But the studio, after some early wrestling for control of the film, gave it up and gave in, and are now 100% on-board. Probably their testing shows something we can’t see for the vast multiplexes of America. A Dances with Wolves for the last of the Billy Graham set? God, it could be just the beginning.

by Michael Bertin

Click to embiggen.

Yes, we are also sick of people stupidly putting things into brackets just because it’s March.

Michael Bertin is a writer rarely in New York.

★ The overstaying winter had switched again from cloudy and too cold to bright and too cold, as if that would make it appealing. Steam blew from the street chimney and people moved about in heavy coats under the high-angled sun, like a movie scene being staged out of season. Wind clawed at a man’s lightweight dress trousers as he walked down Lafayette, his hands jammed so forcefully into his jacket pockets that the quilted fabric bunched up across the small of his back. The wind was numbing, shoving walkers around like a tired mime routine, made no less tired by being real.

“As much as you strategize or you think that you’re going to define yourself, ultimately you get defined, whether it’s by the press or by the… public. And a lot of your calculation is meaningless. You become what you become.”