Isegoria

I assume it’s pretty tame if you see it. Calculated, but tame. Tatu’s Lesbian Kiss Too Controversial:

The BBC said Tuesday it wouldn’t be showing Russian teenage duo Tatu’s pop video which features a controversial lesbian kiss.

Tatu, who shot to the top of the UK charts Sunday with their debut British single “All the Things She Said,” have sparked fury in the British media over accusations they promote “pedo-pop” and target the “dirty old man market.”

Their video features Julia Volkova, 18, and Lena Katina, 17, wearing school uniforms, kissing and cuddling.
[...]
Ivan Shapovalov, the man behind Tatu, has admitted to various media that he came up with the idea after visiting pornographic Web Sites.

There’s also a t.A.T.u website. (Yes, that’s how they spell the band name on their own site).

Addendum: The “All the Things She Said” video is on the t.A.T.u. Screaming for More DVD.

Just a few days ago, I was mentioning Phil Spector in a very different context. Music Producer Phil Spector Held in Fatal Shooting reports:

“Shortly after 5 o’clock this morning Alhambra officers responded to a shooting call and discovered a female shot inside of the location,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Faye Bugarin said.

“She was pronounced dead at the scene and suspect Phillip Spector (the record producer) was taken into custody and is currently being detained,” Bugarin said. “The body is still at the scene.

I feel like a bad Beatles fan. I didn’t even know that Phil “Wall of Sound” Spector produced the original “Let it Be” album. According to Beatles to Re-Release Stripped Down Album, a newly “de-Spectorized” version will come out in the fall:

The surviving Beatles are planning to re-release “Let It Be” the way they intended: stripped down. The album will have the same track listing, but it will not have the orchestration that producer Phil Spector added to it after the band broke up.

I was practically certain that Shania was lip-syncing her Super Bowl performance, but Did Shania Twain Lip-Sync Her Super Bowl Halftime Songs? says otherwise:

ABC producers promised that the pop stars they recruited for this year’s Super Bowl halftime show would do their singing live — no lip-syncing allowed. But what about country star Shania Twain, who seemed to hop around the stage without missing a note?

Paul Liszewski, who produced the sound for the show, says Shania’s mic was hot and her vocals were live. (Other audio engineers who watched the broadcast agreed.) Twain’s accompaniment, however, was what’s called a “band in a box,” which means the back-up vocals and instrumentals we heard were prerecorded. So while the diva was belting out show-stoppers like “Man, I Feel Like a Woman,” her onstage drummer was thrashing away merely for effect.

I had, ahem, no doubt that we were getting live music from No Doubt and Sting, but I was wrong. Sort of:

During No Doubt and Sting’s halftime sets, we were also hearing live vocals and canned instrumentals.

But here’s the kicker. Shania did lip-sync at moments. Sort of:

For big events, even totally “live” bands have tapes standing by in case of emergency. If, say, Bono’s microphone had suddenly failed last year, an engineer in a broadcast truck equipped with an audio mixer would have quickly brought up the sound on a prerecorded version of Bono’s vocal track. If the person doing the blend did the job right, the audience would never even notice the glitch. (That explains the moment when Shania ran back to the stage after mingling with the crowd and didn’t appear to be singing, even though her vocals came through loud and clear. When Twain took too long getting back to the stage, the mixing engineer likely brought up the prerecorded vocal track, and then took it back down as Shania started to sing.)

I couldn’t make this stuff up. From In the Philippines, Stuntmen Take On a New, More Dangerous Role:

Instead of diving through windows or having chairs broken over his back, Mr. Espinosa and other unemployed stuntmen free-lance for the government’s Videogram Regulatory Board for as little as $5 a day. They raid the illegal, back-alley factories that flood the streets of Manila with hundreds of thousands of pirated CDs and DVDs.

In recent years, the Philippines’ movie industry has been decimated by rampant video piracy, making gigs for stuntmen such as Mr. Espinosa few and far between.

As you can see, it’s out of their high-minded sense of propriety that Filipino stuntment protect the sanctity of intellectual property rights.

I recently commented on Fans Howl in Protest as Judge Decides X-Men Aren’t Human — in particular, on this excerpt:

To Brian Wilkinson, editor of the online site X-Fan, Marvel’s argument is appalling. The X-Men ? mere creatures? “This is almost unthinkable,” he says. “Marvel’s super heroes are supposed to be as human as you or I. They live in New York. They have families and go to work. And now they’re no longer human?”

It seems that Brian Wilkinson posted his own little disclaimer on X-Fan:

Disclaimer: Though it’s true that I spoke with Mr. King about this subject, I feel I should point out that my quote is taken slightly out of context. I found the decision and situation humourous and was providing what the fan reaction might be like if this were to take place within the comics themselves. A few other factual errors may also exist within the article, but Mr. King may be forgiven as he is a self-admitted ‘newbie’ to the world of the X-Men.

(Now go back and re-read that disclaimer with your best Simpsons Comic Book Guy voice.)