Sorry about the hiatus. I’m sorry to say there was a death in the family and I have been otherwise occupied. Posting will resume next week.

Thanks for checking back.

Never a dull moment here on the home front. Posting will be light for a few days, but do check back.

James Frey, the fabulist whose memoir “A Million Little Things” was exposed as having been in many parts made up and exaggerated, has gotten an unspecified deal for a new novel, to be called “Bright Shiny Morning.”

Times story here.

WSJ story here.

Frey is a hugely uninteresting guy, but there are a couple of interesting things in the coverage. For example, there’s this in the NYT piece:

In a news release yesterday, HarperCollins announced that Jonathan Burnham, a publisher, had negotiated the deal for “Bright Shiny Morning.” Minutes before the release went out, the news was reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The Times’s policy is to credit the original sources of news, but this one is either a) strained or b) mocking, I can’t decide which.

But it seems plain the Times was on the story as well; the piece, by Motoko Rich, says that Frey was “reached by telephone before the announcement” to respond to rumors he was selling a short-story collection. Frey dismissed the question, saying “I have never written a short story in my life.” The Times rather tendentiously notes he had published one–in a catalog to an LA art show last year.

More exasperating is a comment in the Times story from Nan Talese, who published Frey’s original bullshit book, and had her ass handed to her on a platter by Oprah Winfrey last year.

“I would have loved to see it [Talese said of the new Frey book], but I’m very glad that James has happily landed.”

“He made a mistake by exaggerating those things and not letting us know about it,” she said. “If it wasn’t a four-million-copy best seller, no one would have noticed you’ve made a mistake.”

Talese is using the word “exaggerate” to mean “made tons of stuff up out of whole cloth, including several of the most memorable parts of his book.” On the slow-motion car wreck that was Winfrey’s show on Frey, Talese, who as a book editor might be expected to be a bit more intellectually honest, came off similarly Clintonian.

Here’s the Smoking Gun’s original expose of Frey:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim. It’s a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims’ parents bewildered. “As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident,” said the mother of one of the dead girls. “I figured he was taking license…he’s a writer, you know, they don’t tell everything that’s factual and true.”

Jeff Leeds in the NYT analyzes Britney Spears’ commercial prospects after her much-ridiculed performance at the VMA’s Sunday night:

Endlessly mocked in the mainstream news media and the blogosphere, it has left her fans and her handlers bewildered. The show also left raw nerves: Ms. Spears’s label, Jive Records, sent a note to MTV chastising the network over the comments of the comedian Sarah Silverman, who took the stage immediately after Ms. Spears and referred to her children as “mistakes.”

With her first studio album in four years scheduled for release on Nov. 13, the music industry is debating whether Ms. Spears’s career can recover.

The story does not mention if Jive had anything to say about another of Silverman’s shticks, which involved stretching out her lips and turning her head sideways to approximate Spears’ shaved vagina.

But it does bear the marks of industry finger-pointing, notably from a record company distancing itself from its star:

The idea [to appear on the VMA’s] received a mostly cool reception from Ms. Spears’s principal advisers at Jive. But Ms. Spears’s entertainment lawyer, Gary Stiffelman, figured she could benefit from MTV exposure, and pressed her to sign on. Mr. Stiffelman also helped steer Ms. Spears to a new manager, Jeff Kwatinetz, about a month ago to guide her through preparations for the appearance. Mr. Stiffelman and Mr. Kwatinetz declined to comment.

Ms. Spears began a program of fitness training and choreography sessions to get ready, with executives from MTV and Jive receiving updates on her progress from her management. Shortly after the preparations began, though, Ms. Spears jolted the team by shaking up her coterie of advisers, ousting Mr. Stiffelman.

To hear the public press tell the story, things always used to be better. Music was better, movies were better, TV was better.

This is almost never true, for all sorts of reasons. One is the selectivity of history. It’s easy to think that every movie made in the 1940s was superior because every ’40s flick you see is a stunner. That’s because you’re only watching 20 or 30 films from the era–the ones that people still want to see today.

The flipside of that is neglecting to mention the bad stuff. When CDs came in, paeans to the LP were heard everywhere (and still are). One thing you didn’t hear is that response on an LP plummeted as the needle headed toward the center of the disc; that’s why so many album sides begins with loud rockin’ tracks and end with softer ones. Isn’t that an unforgivable technical compromise?

Anyway, Lee Gomes in the WSJ ($) tells us how mp3s are ruining music:

If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it.

Those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry — producers, engineers, mixers and the like — say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player. That combination is thus becoming the “reference platform” used as a test of how a track should sound.

Wasn’t it ever thus? Didn’t kids walk around with crummy little cassette Walkmans? (In the mid-1970s, I am embarrassed to recall, I had a funky little portable 8-track-tape player I lugged around.) And what about AM car radios? Isn’t it pop lore that Motown producers carefully listened to their productions through tinny car speakers?

But now all of a sudden the iPod is ruining fine music:

All these engineers tend to be audiophiles, the sort who would fuss over a track to make it perfect. But they’re beginning to wonder if they should bother.

“I care about quality, even though the kid on the street might like what he hears on MySpace, which is even worse than an MP3,” said Stuart Brawley, an L.A. engineer who has recorded Cher and Michael Jackson. “We try to make the best quality sound we can, but we increasingly have to be realistic about how much time we can spend doing it.”

Howard Benson, who has done work for Santana and Chris Daughtry, says members of a studio recording crew will sometimes complain after a session, “I just spent all this time getting the greatest guitar and drums solo, and it ends up as an MP3.”

Sigh. Gomes is a smart guy, and notes a lot of caveats at the end of his column, but his thoughts are ill-timed. The fact is, as I noted below, the compressed mp3 sound will be an evanescent phenomenon. Already the new 160-gig iPod will hold 9,000 or 10,000 songs, or the entire CD collection of most music fans, in the Apple Lossless format, which promises full CD-quality sound.

The story ends with this indefensible quote from studio owner Skip Saylor, nostalgia-monger extraordinaire:

Still, engineers experience some nostalgia about earlier technologies. Says Mr. Saylor, “What we’ve lost with this new era of massive compression and low fidelity are the records that sounds so good that you get lost in them. “Dark Side of the Moon” — records like that just aren’t being made today.”

Matea Gold in the LAT makes the rounds before the Emmys this Sunday to see what HBO needs to do in a post-Albrecht, post-”Sopranos” world. (The show has 15 nominations for its last season, including its delectable finale; Chris Albrecht was the network’s talented capo, who flamed out in the spring after hitting his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot.)

The fix the network is in is good for us viewers; HBO is taking a seeing-what-sticks approach, and trying everything from absurdist sit-coms like “Flight of the Conchords” to joyless sexfests like “Tell Me You Love Me.” There’s more to come, says Gold:

That’s not to say that HBO doesn’t have high expectations for the trio of new programs it picked up for next year: “12 Miles of Bad Road,” an hourlong dramedy by “Designing Women” creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, with Lily Tomlin as a Dallas real estate magnate; vampire drama “True Blood,” executive produced by “Six Feet Under’s” Alan Ball; and “In Treatment,” executive producer Mark Wahlberg’s adaptation of an Israeli series about a therapist, played by Gabriel Byrne, struggling with his own demons.

Next spring will also mark the arrival of “John Adams,” a $100-million miniseries based on David McCullough’s biography, starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Simon — whose gritty urban drama “The Wire” will return in January for its final season — is also producing “Generation Kill,” a miniseries for next fall about a group of Marines who participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fan favorites “Big Love” and “Entourage,” as well as the quirky cult hit “Flight of the Conchords,” will return midyear.

And further down the road:

To ensure a steady pool of creative talent, [HBO execs] have sought out people in the industry who didn’t have previous relationships with the network, urging them to bring their ideas to HBO. Strauss is developing a new project with Milch and is working with Martin Scorsese on a series about the development of Atlantic City. And HBO Films is overseeing nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of productions around the world, including “The Pacific,” a $200-million World War II miniseries from executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, set to air in 2009 as the companion piece to “Band of Brothers.”

The story closes with this optimistic quote…

“We’ve never had a bigger and more aggressive slate than we have at the moment,” said Colin Callender, president of HBO Films. “The important thing here at HBO is that we continue to take risks and that talent feels it’s a place where they can take risks with us. I think in that sense, we all shared a clear creative vision.”

… but I think obscures one key issue. Even if you take HBO’s public mantra of its charter at face value–the one that says it has a sophisticated audience, which wants the network to program adventurously and will allow it to fail occasionally–the reality of its dizzying profit margins is slightly different. Those were helped along mightily by DVD sales, led by “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under” and of course “The Sopranos.” That’s many many millions of sets sold at $40, $50, $60 and more. That all adds up, as did the syndication sales of the shows to basic cable–$2.5 million per episode of “The Sopranos” alone. What those figures have in common is that they were all free money. HBO doesn’t need a critical hit. It needs another cash cow–or two or three.

The LAT says that, on the first day of the release of the new albums from Kanye West and 50 Cent, West is kicking 50 Cent’s ass.

Reports Todd Martens:

That can’t be pleasant news for 50 Cent, who touched off quite a tempest last month when he told the website SOHH.com: “If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on Sept. 11, I’ll no longer write music. I’ll write music and work with my other artists, but I won’t put out any more solo albums.”

In the dreary world of hip-hop feuds, or beefs, this was a refreshing development. The CDs went on sale Tuesday, so the figures quoted in the LAT story are not definitive as yet. For updates, check out the box in the upper right-hand corner of this Amazon page, which is keeping track of the pair’s sales on the site. As of this writing, West was ahead by more than two to one.

Michael Cieply in the NYT reports that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces tomorrow (Wednesday) that Jon Stewart will be the host of the 2007 Oscars. The show is scheduled for Feb. 28 of next year.

Stewart hosted the 2005 awards, when “Brokeback Mountain” lost out to “Crash.” Ellen DeGeneres hosted last year, when “The Departed,” yawn, beat out “Babel” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” (Not to mention the unnominated “Children of Men,” Hitsville’s film of the year.)

For those who care, here’s how the audience numbers stack up, per Cieply:

The ceremony drew just 38.9 million viewers on Mr. Stewart’s watch. The number was smaller than the 39.9 million drawn by this year’s ceremony, whose host was Ellen DeGeneres, who played it folksy in an open collar and red velvet, or the 42.1 million who watched Chris Rock, who played with fire when he tweaked stars like Jude Law in 2005.

It was also far below the 55 million who tuned in when the immensely popular “Titanic” swept the awards in 1998, and Billy Crystal made one of his eight appearances as host.

Nikki Finke trumpets that the Harry Potter films are the biggest box-office franchise of all time—or, as she breathlessly hedlines it, “Harry Potter Biggest Film Franchise Ever!”:

With the success of this summer’s Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix, Warner Bros announced today that its five Harry Potter films have combined to become the top-grossing film franchise worldwide in history. It surpasses even the box office total of all 22 James Bond and 6 Star Wars franchises, with two films yet to come — Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The combined worldwide box office gross for the five Harry Potter films to date is in excess of $4.47 billion even as The Order Of The Phoenix is still going strong in theaters around the globe. In addition to holding the franchise box office record, all five of the Harry Potter films are among the 20 top-grossing box office hits of all time.

This is, of course, the “Inflated Play Money™” box-office record beloved by studio publicists, those who have a need to suck up to them, and the dumb. Finke is talking about worldwide grosses, at which the Harry Potter films excel in particular and in any case benefit from more efficient modern studio global-marketing campaigns. Still, as can be seen in Box Office Mojo’s inflation-corrected list of domestic earnings, all but one of the Star Wars films made more money than the highest-grossing of the Potters, “Sorcerer’s Stone.” (The original “Star Wars” made three times what “Sorcerer’s Stone” did, in fact.) And George Lucas isn’t too bad at worldwide marketing himself. I don’t feel like doing the math, but since two of the 22 James Bond films (”Thunderball” and “Goldfinger”) heavily outgrossed “Sorcerer’s Stone” domestically, I don’t think it’s likely Potter surpasses Bond, either, in real dollars.

p.s. to the ongoing Apple vs. NBC items, below:

How many times are journalists going to keep quoting with a straight face the PR guy from NBC talking about “attractive” pricing, anyway? Again, the quote is:

“Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

Is that guy attractive, er, high? And why don’t the reporters ask the direct follow-up question: Did NBC want to raise the prices on its shows on the iTunes Store, yes or no?

“Attractive” isn’t the only word that means “high” right now. “Flexible,” as one can see from the Shields quote, seems to mean that as well. Here’s another example from the Times the other day, about the producers of the new Mel Brooks musical, “Young Frankenstein,” readying the money trough:

Earlier this summer the production unveiled a tiered ticketing scale, with the tickets for the 250 or so best seats in the theater priced at $450 and $375 on weekends and matinees, a move that was criticized as much for its timing — i.e., before the show opened and achieved hit status — as for the prices themselves.

Mr. Sillerman, who said he was simply trying to make ticketing more flexible, pointed out that the show was also holding lotteries for $25 front-row seats at most performances, and reserving a large number of center-orchestra seats for sale only at the Hilton box office for the nonpremium $120 price.

There’s “flexible” again. Let’s do the math and see what flexible means here. Two hundred and fifty seats times four times the usual top ticket price equals a potential income equal to more than half again what the producers could generate in a sold-out house in the 1800-seat theater. So “flexible” in this context equals “almost 50 percent more money for the producers.”

But, that’s not all. Sillerman also says he is reserving “a large number” of seats for sale at $120, which sounds positively generous, until you remember that $120 is already at the high end of Broadway’s top normal ticket price. The writer of the Times story doesn’t describe it that way, opting instead to call that price a “nonpremium” one. I, inflexibly, call it a “greedily high” one.

So that’s the other definition of “flexible” on Broadway: “Some tickets we’ll sell at four times the normal rate, but we’ll also sell some at the high end of regular price. We don’t price every ticket insensibly high. We’re flexible!”

Julie Taymor’s Beatles pastiche gets a qualified rave from Justin Chang in Variety:

All you need is love — for the Beatles, for psychedelic visuals, for ideas about being young in the ‘60s — to fully enjoy “Across the Universe.” Julie Taymor has delivered an audacious, idiosyncratic creation that plays like a riff on “Hair” with Fab Four cachet, stretching a thin love story across one tumultuous decade. It’s all played with such conviction, that it’s hard to dislike but hard to take seriously. Pic’s commercial prospects look more in line with those of “Rent” than of “Chicago,” though the Taymor touch achieves enough sporadic moments of invention and punch-drunk romanticism to steal the hearts of baby boomers and young female auds in particular.

David Carr in the NYT takes a contrarian view of Steve Jobs’ face-off with NBC, which doesn’t like the single-pricing for its TV shows at the iTunes store. Carr says:

Let me get this straight: Steve Jobs insists that songs on iTunes cost 99 cents and television episodes cost $1.99 because consumers crave simple pricing.

Except, of course, when it comes to Apple’s own products.

He’s talking about Apple’s decision to lower the price of an iPhone by a third. The company endured a lot of complaints from first adopters and offered them $100 credit in Apple products.

Carr continues:

[W]hen you think about it, the media companies Mr. Jobs is fighting with want the opportunity to make the same mistake.

Earlier this summer, the Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, said it would not renew its contract with iTunes because it wanted more flexibility in setting prices. Last week, NBC Universal and Apple issued dueling press announcements, with Apple saying it would not carry television shows from the coming NBC season because the network wanted double the $1.99 price and NBC saying that was not true.

“Apple is not telling the truth. We never asked to double the wholesale price of our shows,” said Cory Shields, a spokesman for NBC Universal. “Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

There’s an interesting issue here, of why Jobs won’t just let the record companies and networks do what they want. His reasons (which I attempted to limn below) are defensible; but since he makes his money from iPods, not the iTunes Store, why does he care? It could be that Jobs thinks he right. Carr’s not buying it, which is fair, but I think he missed a few things:

1) For the record, Apple does have a simple pricing strategy for the vast majority of its products, and doesn’t let wholesalers discount, either. In the past it has paid the price for this rigidity, of course.
2) When the NBC spokesperson says, “Apple is not telling the truth,” he carefully clarifies what he claims Apple is not telling the truth about. You’ll note he never says, “NBC does not, in any way, want to raise the price of its products on iTunes.” Absent that assertion, it’s reasonable to assume NBC did want to increase the price of its shows and that, when Shields talks about “making our products more attractive to consumers” he is talking about raising prices. So I think it’s NBC that is lying.
3) Then Carr makes this case:

[Jobs’] arguments against variable pricing (flat rates draw new customers and lessen the appeal of piracy) may have worked a couple years ago, but they are starting to sound a little self-serving. The Web, after all, can easily enable infinitely customized pricing. eBay proved that people will not only track prices closely, but act in their own consuming self-interest.

Should buying media be any different than bidding on a canoe or last season’s Banana Republic sweater?

First, again, it’s hard to see how Jobs’ intransigence on this issue is self-serving. Second, the appeal of piracy is not only still present, it is getting more appealing. In fact, there’s even more ethical wriggle room for consumers when it comes to video. It goes something like, “Hey, I watched this on TV, with commercials, which is the deal the networks cut with me the consumer. I made a VHS tape, but artificial constructs mean I can’t use that tape the way I want to—on my iPod for example. I might buy the DVD at some point, but I can’t play that on my iPod either. So fuck it, there’s no way I’m paying three times for the same show. I’m going to torrent a few episodes.”

Which is why, of course, buying media these days is different from buying a canoe.

Nice to read a refreshing take on the critic’s art:

It’s become a little embarrassing, frankly. I find myself answering the same handful of disgruntled questions, time and again, about how and why I dare to work as a theater critic. My favorite entreaties include “Why are you so mean?” (Because I can be) and “Don’t you care that theater people pour their hearts and souls into every production?” (Not particularly). Mostly people want to know how I could have possibly liked or disliked a particular show, or want to accuse me of having a personal vendetta against theater folk, because I reportedly do nothing but gripe about the shows I see.

And that’s just the first graf. The writer, who goes by the name Robrt L. Pela, is the theater critic at the Phoenix New Times, flagship paper of the now 16-paper chain, which also owns the Village Voice and the LA Weekly, and is a good example of the sort of thing that drives the chain’s detractors crazy. (Disclosure: I worked for New Times in the mid-’90s.) It’s the kind of essay that would never be printed in the Village Voice.

Local theater criticism is one critical venue where the work of one writer, generally at the local daily, has virtually complete hegemony over the health of any one production. The whys and wherefores of this are often overstated. It basically comes down to the fact that a swing of a few hundred customers can make or break a production, and a paper with a few hundred thousand in circulation can persuade or dissuade that number fairly easily with a well-worded rave or a quick pan. (Local dailies can also kill just by lack of attention, of course.)

As a consequence, the reviews of daily critics tend to range from raves to apologetic demurrals. The alternatives are usually left to fill in the blanks and shoot the deserving fish in the local barrel. It’s a fun but sometimes thankless endeavor; Pela doesn’t say it, but in the long run it’s also good for the health of the local scene.

The NYT’s Brooks Barnes notes a turnaround from Warners in its web endeavors:

Warner Brothers has discarded its initial strategy of insisting that advertisers shoulder production costs from the start. Instead, it has decided to finance most projects itself and worry about lining up advertisers to recoup costs later.

“In trying to get the business off the ground,” said Craig Hunegs, executive vice president for business development, “we ended up in a bit of a dance with advertisers about what various projects would look like.”

The shift underlines a growing realization among the big Hollywood studios: Web entertainment is evolving so quickly that they must take on more financial risk to keep up.

The WSJ ($) noted in an editorial over the weekend that NBC has been forced to stop running “Law & Order” reruns while one of the show’s stars, Fred Thompson, runs for president. The paper happily notes that TNT, the cable station, doesn’t have to:

Why should L&O junkies have to suffer just because District Attorney Arthur Branch, er, Mr. Thompson is running for President?

… the editorial board asks, rhetorically. It answers:

The ostensible justification for equal time provisions is that, in a world of media scarcity, broadcasters need to provide a political platform for everyone on an equal basis, lest one candidate gain an unfair advantage through more exposure.

This might have made sense when these rules were written by Congress in the 1930s, but it’s a hard policy to defend in today’s media-saturated world. The sheer volume of media outlets today not only renders these regulations obsolete but also makes fair enforcement all but impossible.

The editorial is worth noting because it is an example of an easy test as to whether those who comment on FCC oversight of the broadcast networks and terrestrial radio are being intellectually honest.

Broadcasters operate over public airwaves. The controllers of those airwaves were given a public resource for a pittance; they now own money factories. (One sale of a Chicago station I covered was bought in the ’70s in the low three figures and was sold in the mid-’90s in the high eight figures.) Those who are allowed to broadcast on that spectrum knew the rules when they bought their stations or networks. Having amassed fortunes through those public trusts, they now hire (tax-deductible) lobbyists to try to change the rules and are supported in this endeavor by institutions like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Any argument about the FCC that does not make reference to that dominating issue, as the WSJ editorial does not, can readily be seen to be practicing the politics of distraction.

Again, the editorial instead devotes itself to refuting this different point:

The ostensible justification for equal time provisions is that, in a world of media scarcity, broadcasters need to provide a political platform for everyone on an equal basis, lest one candidate gain an unfair advantage through more exposure.

Now, to the way most of us watch TV, with broadcast and cable station run together, this seems like a strange distinction. But there is a difference. Just as people can buy as many magazines as they want with stories about Fred Thompson, we can pay for cable and watch all the Fred Thompson TV shows we want. But the broadcast airwaves are still free, and there’s no reason a candidate should benefit from a corporate largess over them. Secondly, the broadcast networks, while fading, are still potent purveyors of a mass audience. Cable shows bigger than typical prime-time broadcast audiences are still rare, and even a network “Law & Order” rerun is watched by many times more people than a first-run cable show.

There’s at least one other issue here that the editorial carefully does not mention. NBC is part of NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric. GE is the sort of outfit that could benefit by having as U.S. president a man whom one of its subsidiaries dutifully broadcast dynamic footage of, week after week, during a wide-open campaign.

In one sense, the editorial is right; media isn’t scarce any more. But the real issue is corporations chafing under restrictions to their power. A corporation will always seek any economic advantage it can take, and it will offer just about any preposterous story when challenged. When it gets caught, it will say, in effect, Hey, it’s what we do to maximize shareholder value. Beware of newspaper editorials proffering the preposterous along the way.

The Chicago Sun-Times, citing unnamed sources, reports that the R. Kelly child pornography trial, postponed abruptly last week, will not be held until spring. The case was set for jury selection starting Sept. 17, but the judge in the case on Tuesday announced it would not proceed. It was later reported that the delay was caused by complications after the birth of the lead prosecutor’s child.

The judge, Vincent Gaughan, has been handling the cases of men accused of the so-called Brown’s Chicken Massacre in a Chicago suburb in 1993, in which seven people were killed. The Sun-Times said the Kelly case would go to trial after the trial of the second accused Brown’s Chicken murderer, which is scheduled for Feb. 13 of next year.

That will be the sixth anniversary of the releases of the videotape that shows Kelly having sex with a young woman, whom police have said was a girl of 13 or 14 at the time. For the record, Kelly has said it’s not him on the tape and the girl alleged to be on it, the daughter of an associate of Kelly’s, has said it’s not her.

The Chicago Tribune offered this short profile of the self-denying, workaholic prosecutor who prompted the delay. The implication is that if she needed to delay the trial for medical reasons (the story doesn’t specify what they are), it’s probably legitimate.

The paper also offered this longer takeout examining why the trial has taken so long to begin. There have been medical problems: The judge took a fall off a ladder and broke some bones; Kelly suffered a burst appendix. Kelly’s lawyers have filed some 30 motions, which have delayed the trial consistently; beyond that, his team was allowed to delay the trial further as one of his attorneys worked on some other high-profile Chicago cases, including a former Illinois governor, George Ryan, and newspaper scalawag Conrad Black,.

On that final point, the Tribune reports this:

[F]orcing Kelly to choose another lawyer would have risked reversal on appeal.

“It’s better to try these cases once and have confidence in the outcome, than to press forward and [create] potential error,” said Mark Rotert, a former federal and state prosecutor now in private practice.

To a layman like me, this state of affairs seems to invite abuse; if a lawyer has other commitments, that’s his client’s problem, not the court’s.

The story hints at one other thing that’s more disturbing:

While it is not unheard of for cases at the Criminal Courts Buildings to drag on for this long, those often are more complicated murder cases.

“When something slips for five years, neither party, in my judgment, wants to see this case go to trial,” said Steven Miller, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.

Miller said it was much easier to see why the defense might prefer the case to move slowly, since Kelly could continue to work and make money in the interim.

But “criminal cases, unlike wine, rarely get better with age, if you’re the prosecution,” Miller said. “So the prosecution typically wants to move a case along expeditiously.”

My emphasis; the paper doesn’t examine the implications of this.

The story is a good background on this tangled affair, but it is closer to something that would be appropriate at the two- or three-year mark of a long case. Doesn’t anyone care that he will have been running around free for six years by the time the case goes to trial? Again, the scandal here is that there are at least three well-documented instances of Kelly having sex with under-aged girls. He’s innocent until proven guilty, of course, but shouldn’t there at least be a trial at some point? And as I wrote below, isn’t he in the position to continue to indulge his predilections–recording and touring and having lots of chances to interact with his (young) fans?

Amy Finnerty in the WSJ ($):

No soft focus here. An aging couple (the therapist and her retired husband) enacts foreplay to a jarringly incongruous pop music soundtrack. A middle-aged mom, neglected by her husband, watches forlornly as he engages in the auto-erotic act that he prefers in lieu of sex with her. A more assertive wife — one driven by baby-lust — uses a venerable method to procure sperm from her husband for a volume assessment, in one of many scenes in which the camera angles are not so much candid as utterly unabashed. An exhaustive catalog of sexual acts is graphically depicted and no detail that can shock is kept off-camera.

Shales:

The goal is verisimilitude, not titillation, but that’s not to say this is a stuffy or scholarly look at sex. It’s just an impressively honest and open one.

Allesandra Stanley in the NYT isn’t buying what HBO is selling:

The series bores deeply and single-mindedly into the marrow of marital relations, and it does so with sympathy and insight. It’s daring but not revolutionary. “Tell Me You Love Me” is a little like a jazz musician who wants to scandalize the audience but still be asked to play in the orchestra at the country club dance.

Variety’s Brian Lowry has his doubts, too:

Yet those positives are leavened by the program’s deadly sincerity and almost total lack of humor, as well as moments when the sex’s graphic nature proves distracting (as in, “Hey, were those his balls?”), disconnecting you from the show’s reality. In that respect, “Tell Me” compares unfavorably with HBO’s “Big Love,” which also tackles the vagaries of marriage, albeit from a more exotic starting point.

Crazy Nikki, not to be trifled with, gets slipped a remarkably embarrassing email from fellow-breathless-Tinseltown-tattler Jeffrey Wells, of Hollywood Elsewhere, and publishes it, to general merriment.

Here’s an interesting issue. The email in question was sent Aug. 9; one doubts that “3:10 to Yuma” director James Mangold accommodated Wells’ slightly pervy request.

To Wells’ credit, one must note, he told Mangold he didn’t like the movie and that he would ding it close to the film’s release, which is this Friday. Wells’ eventual post on it, which is a little overdone but well within the bounds of fair comment and far above the level of most internet film commentary, was published midday Wednesday. Sometime after that, it seems, someone in Mangold’s camp leaked the email.

Wells’ request is unforgivable, but you get the feeling he had reason to believe he would have gotten what he asked for.

The CEO of Apple is giving those who bought the iPhone at the top $599 list price a $100 rebate in Apple credit. In an open letter on the Apple site , he talks like a guy who’s heard a lot of complaints over the years:

[B]eing in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane.

But in the end he concedes the mistake:

[E]ven though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

As Jobs says, a new price for an old product isn’t unusual, but the hefty one-third price drop (which meant, in turn, that early adopters paid a 50-percent premium) is quite a benchmark.

It doesn’t go without saying that one should never buy the first iteration of an Apple product (that goes double for Windows-related goods); I speak as someone who’s worked on a Mac since a boxy little 512. It’s always best to wait a year to get the hot new Mac thing; there’s always little kinks and sometimes there are big ones. Further tip for price-watchers: The absolute best way to buy a Apple product is to wait until a new product line is announced and then hit an Apple Store or a reseller like MacMall and get the last iteration at a discount, which can be $300 or more on mid-priced laptops.

WSJ ($) story on the imbroglio is here.

NYT story here.

The Journal has the most lucid account of some of the fine print of Jobs’ offer:

Apple and AT&T also said yesterday that customers who had purchased the $599 iPhone, with eight gigabytes of storage capacity, at one of their stores within 14 days of Wednesday’s price cut can choose a $200 cash refund instead of the $100 store credit. People who bought a low-end $499 iPhone model within the 14 days can return it for a full refund instead of taking the credit. Apple on Wednesday said it was discontinuing the low-end iPhone, with four gigabytes of storage, as most of its customers preferred the eight-gigabyte model.

The LAT gets creative on its web site, giving us a rundown of the hip-hop stars 50 Cent has had “beefs” with in a reported slide show.

The format, however, isn’t easy to use, and if you don’t know specifically what it is you’ve clicked on, it’s hard to figure out that a) you’re in a slide show and b) that you’re supposed to click the “next” button to move one.

(Forgive me for getting granular here, but sloppy execution is a key reason newspaper web sites don’t always click with web-savvy readers, who tend to skew younger and are exactly the people the newspaper sites need to attract more of. So it’s worth discussing in detail why the feature doesn’t work)

The whole presentation is a little low rent. The first problem is that the link from the front page doesn’t say it’s a slide show. The second is a product of the fact that newspaper web sites tend to keep entirely separate the writers’ “text” and the mechanics of the web site.

Here, that dichotomy makes the presentation of a nice idea mightily confusing. The intro from writer Chris Lee is written in a vague and gnomic fashion, and it ends with what seems to be a big typo–a colon with nothing after it. A photo credit forlornly floats in the space after the text stops, as if it had slipped off its proper place on the photo opposite it.

The intro to the slideshow should have explicitly told visitors what they were getting into: “50 Cent disses so many people that the only way to make sense of it all is to set up a slide show and let him hurl his brickbats one by one. Click here to begin the show, and hit the ‘next’ button on the right-hand top of each frame to see his next victim.”

Beyond that, 50 Cent’s quotes are mildly diverting, though the intro should have taken time to note how manufactured a lot of these beefs are. On the other hand, 50 Cent is saying he will retire from rapping if Kanye West moves more CDs than him next week, when both rappers have new records out. Would that it were true.