… to, of all people, his nemesis Patterico.

Even if you’ve been following the tangled strands of this issue—which range from the killings of Tupac and Biggie Smalls to corruption in the LAPD to the crazy Anthony Pellicano trial to other crime-related exposes Philips wrote over his many years as an LA Times investigative reporter—you may find this hard going.

Patterico says he’ll be doling parts of the 90-minute chat this week. The first entry is mostly about Philips’ defense of letters the reporter wrote to a prisoner named Alexander Proctor, who was involved in the government’s case against Pellicano.

Basically, Patterico says Philips was trying to get Proctor to testify more favorably toward Pellicano, by for example repeatedly stressing that a key conversation Proctor’d had with another witness hadn’t been recorded.

The implication is apparently that Philips was not-so-subtly hinting that Proctor could change his story without being confronted with damning evidence that he had done so.

I’ve read the thing twice and can’t get my mind around it. I wouldn’t write letters like that. And there’s something a bit off the point about one or two of Philips answers. And for all I know the darkest suspicions of Patterico and Philips’s other critics—that Philips was on Suge Knight’s payroll, that he was working not to get the truth out but to advance Pellicano’s agenda—are true.

Certainly Philips ended up in a weird rabbit hole after his many years of covering the Tupac/Smalls cases, and Patterico has undermined his other work about a convicted murderer named Waymond Anderson as well.

All that said, investigative reporting is a difficult business. (Sometimes it all goes wrong, as Philips knows.) And some of the stuff bruited about by Patterico & Co. is pretty pathetic. (I think this is the umpteenth Philips-related blog post I’ve read that discusses whether he waved at Pellicano at the guy’s wedding, or bothered to pull a paper and pen out of his pocket at a court hearing he attended.)

Patterico says he’ll post about what Philips said about the Anderson and Tupac cases later this week.

The long knives are out for Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s new film. Nikki Finke is scoffing at both the film and Nicole Kidman’s box office draw. Slate’s Dana Stevens is revolted: “Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.”

Variety is respectful but doubtful. And the thing didn’t get a big spread in last Sunday’s NYT.

I don’t care if Australia turns out to be a flop or not, but it would be a shame if this ambitious, deceptively transparent movie doesn’t get a little critical respect. On the surface, yes, it’s a larger-than-life, utterly absurd pastiche. The plot? Rough ranch hand helps citified female protect her homestead; war, class and race issues, love intrude. And when I say larger than life, I mean Titanic-style larger than life. There really hasn’t been a movie like this since Titanic; Australia is nearly three hours long, muscularly envisioned and executed, unabashedly romantic and surprisingly affecting throughout.

But where in the case of James Cameron’s epic that’s where the story ends, in Luhrmann’s hands that’s just the start. In Moulin Rouge!, you’ll recall, Luhrmann began with a similarly barebones plot (writer falls for consumptive prostitute), draped it in literally dozens of pop clichés—that is to say, clichés from pop songs—and created a dizzying meditation on (and send-up of) aestheticism for the ages.

Now, in Australia he’s moved on to throwing movie tropes around, mainly from classic Hollywood studio gossamer from the 1930s and ‘40s. So many movies are referenced with over- and undertones it quickly exhausted my flimsy understanding of that history: Gone With the Wind and Casablanca (and every war movie), The African Queen and The Searchers (and seemingly every John Ford western), Giant, Out of Africa, hints of Lawrence of Arabia….

Here’s what I think reviewers are missing: The main question about Australia is, What’s the point of all the film references?

Here’s my theory.

Of all of the references the two that stand out the most are Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. The latter, as you know if you’ve seen the film, is explicitly a part of Australia: In a key scene, Kidman sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to little Nullah, the half-caste aboriginal boy. That musical motif haunts the rest of the film. Later, Nullah gets to see the film for himself in a climactic scene.

As for GWTW, it’s programmed right into that barebones plot: The endangered homestead, the uptight rich woman who gets her hands dirty to save it…

… all set, of course, in a morally compromised world. Luhrmann is foregrounding race even while patterning his film on Hollywood’s most famous film not to do so. The way of life Scarlett and her world watch crumble before them is a notoriously romanticized one. Luhrmann knows there’s little talk of what the South was really fighting for in Gone With the Wind; here, with his focus on the way the Australian government handled the country’s Aboriginal population in general and half-caste kids in particular, he had to confront not just the practice itself, but the way pop culture became complicit.

Seen that way, Australia is a mirror film, both exploring and exploding the history of the movies. It is a western that isn’t set in the American West, a musical with no songs, a war movie to which war comes as an afterthought. As Nullah watches The Wizard of Oz, he goes through the mirror entirely, a half-caste kid forced to see it in blackface, a sobering reminder of how even movie theaters were complicit in our racist past.

Now, in this context, Gone With the Wind makes sense as a target—but what’s with The Wizard of Oz references?

First, The Wizard of Oz is itself a mirror of GWTW. They are the two most famous American movies ever made, both released in 1939, both MGM creations, both credited to Victor Fleming, though each had a tangled production tale.* (In a sense, the scene of Nullah watching Oz represents one film, GWTW, watching its twin.)

Second, of course, “Oz” is Australia, and Nullah dubs himself its wizard.

The third thing is something that requires me to discuss some of the events of Australia in detail, so stop reading now if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want plot points revealed.

At first I figured the Oz reference was just a wink in the context of the GWTW template. But as the notes to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” kept cropping up I thought bigger things were at work; it wasn’t until the death of Kipling Flynn, the drunk accountant, that I noticed that he looked a lot like the Cowardly Lion.

If you have seen the film, you can easily see how the other deaths fit in: The Drover’s sidekick, Magarri, eventually dies too, in the guise of the Scarecrow. The Drover is the Tin Man. He was supposed to die, as well, but Luhrmann backed down after test screenings and changed the ending.

None of these are meant to track thematically, I don’t think; the drunkard wasn’t a coward, and the sidekick wasn’t dumb, and the Drover if anything wears his heart on his sleeve from the start. Luhrmann’s just using the characters in the film as a schema to program his plot against.

Nicole Kidman, displaced from England, was Dorothy, of course, and that made Nullah… who? Toto? That didn’t seem right. Then a friend pointed out that Nullah is Dorothy. He’s orphaned; he’s taken away from his home; he had his own Toto, which like the rest of the Oz characters is grimly killed off.

But what does The Wizard of Oz have to do with Australia thematically? I think it comes in the last scene, when Nullah goes back home, just as Dorothy did. I think there’s a lot of cultural prejudice that most audiences would bring to this tale; it’s hard to think Nullah would be better off in the bush. But Dorothy, too, was going back to a primitive existence, and one not without its dangers, what with pig pens to fall into and tornadoes about.

Besides the kitschy tone, Australia has some problems. The narrative is this very long and self-consciously epic film is not handled smoothly; there are fits and starts; one minor character dies early on under circumstances that make no sense; and there’s even a long stretch, during the third quarter of the film, that seems almost unmoored from the rest of it. Kidman’s performance is visibly  erratic at the film’s beginning, and again: This is a candy-colored brawny spoof of the entire idea of filmmaking.

But we always say we want smart movies that have substance and subtexts. In all its florid glory, that’s what you have with Australia.

*  My friend Michael Sragow is finishing up his long-awaited biography of Fleming, set for publication in December.

Microsoft is cutting prices on the Zune to try to drum up sales for the holiday season. The company has enlisted Common and Afrika Bombaataa for a new line of ads. Here’s one of them:

The AP story linked to above is genial and credulous:

Common, a brand-savvy rapper and actor willing to team up with big companies - he promoted Gap clothing in a 2006 holiday commercial - is an apt poster child for Zune, because he appeals to hip-hop fans but also plays well in the mainstream. A second TV spot features Tennessee rockers Kings of Leon talking to The Band’s Robbie Robertson, a nod [to] the college-age indie music crowd.

I assume that if Kings of Leon and Robertson keep at it, they can be “brand-savvy” some day, too.

… is about to produce a typical burst of Beatles-related hyperbole. (Reuters: “Mythical Beatles song to be released.”)

It’s not mythical and it really isn’t a Beatles song. It was a ten-minute-plus sound-effects tape Paul McCartney marshaled together for an art festival at a London theater. In Mark Lewisohn’s history of the group’s recording sessions it’s clear the project was so unlike a song that it it exasperated George Martin. (”This is ridiculous, we’ve got to get our teeth into something a little more constructive.”)

But there are a few interesting things about it. One, it’s apparently never been bootlegged, though it still resides in the Abbey Road archives. According to Lewisohn, McCartney packed the track off to deliver it to the fest organizers, but he apparently held on to a copy, too.

Of course any unreleased Beatles track is of intrinsic interest. What the potential release of the song at this point is about, however, is yet another lingering example of McCartney’s bruised ego about having his aesthetic reputation overshadowed by the work of “the experimental one,” John. “Carnival of Light” was put together a year and a half before Lennon’s  “Revolution 9,” the group’s sole contemporary excursion, leaving aside the Christmas releases, into something approaching avant-garde song construction.

McCartney thought he lead the group into adventuresome musical territory, and wasn’t above noting that Lennon had been living “out in the suburbs by the golf course with Cynthia” (Lennon’s first wife) while he, McCartney, was grooving with the real avant-gardists of the time.

You can get a sense of McCartney’s understanding of avant-gardism as Billboard quotes him describing the song’s genesis:

“I said [to the other musicians] all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn’t need to make any sense,” McCartney said of the music. “Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around. So that’s what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It’s very free.”

The anonymous blogger Patterico makes a significant addition to his ongoing jihad against former LA Times reporter Chuck Philips here.

The exhaustive (and somewhat exhausting) entry is an analysis of Philips’ relationship with a rapper named Waymond Anderson, who was portrayed in a series of Philips articles as innocent of the murder he’s serving a life prison term for.

Patterico dug up a lengthy deposition Anderson gave, which he says Philips had partially reported on in the past. The part he didn’t report on, according to Patterico, contains Anderson basically saying a lot of patently crazy stuff about his case and the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, two other pet subjects of Philips’.

Philips had used Anderson as a source in at least two important articles; Patterico’s point is that a) anyone reading the full testimony could see he was a loon and b) by not sharing the crazy stuff with readers Philips was covering up his blockbuster source’s iffy bona fides.

Ironically enough, Anderson has recently been embarrassing Philips in an entirely different way.

Lots, lots more in Patterico’s full entry.

Hitsville previous writings on the Chuck Philips case are here.

My friend David Carr touches on two issues in his NYT column today on the problems in newspapers: The contempt that a new wave of business-minded owners, like Sam Zell, have toward the journalistic missions of their new charges, and the departure of older and presumably more experienced staffers in buyouts.

For the first, I think a distinction needs to be made between the ownership of the papers and the management of them we’re seeing. An issue too-seldom focused on is the debt the companies are now desperately trying to service. The Tribune company, which owns the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and many other papers, has at least $12 billion owing. I haven’t read yet that any of these papers are losing money—most, actually, just aren’t minting it the way they did for so many years.

What the papers have now they didn’t have before—I mean, besides the falling circ and advertising—is that debt.

It’s the price the company paid for the privilege of having Sam Zell own it. It’s one thing for him to have bought the place and undermined its quality: In theory, he bought it and he can do with it what he likes, contempt for the mission or no. But there is something unnecessary, almost decadent, about the current situation, in which he didn’t precisely buy it, but borrowed the money to get control, and is now  strangling an institution with his hubris.

Now, all that said, the other factor too seldom mentioned is the part these papers played digging their own graves, including (and this never gets mentioned) the staffs themselves. Carr talks about the loss of institutional memories and experience that the buyouts are costing these operations. That’s definitely true, but another hard truth about the industry shouldn’t go unsaid, which is that there’s a lot of people at these papers who don’t do a lot of work, or who haven’t done anything to help them adjust to the new realities of the profession—which, let’s be honest, have been staring them in the face for more than a decade.

I had to laugh as I read Carr’s column when I read this remark from a media analyst: “Circulation declines were deeper in the last period, and I have to say that I think it has to do with the quality problems from cuts.”

What about the quality problems before the cuts?

As a press critic in Chicago, and then in San Francisco, I gleefully charted the way both local papers in each city at various times didn’t employ a pop music writer worthy of the name. This was back when the papers were minting money as usual. It was not-that-subtle a signal what the paper thought about new generations of readers.

I think it’s a fallacy, incidentally, to ascribe the papers’ financial stability to things like editorial quality; they have traditionally made that money off their monopoly hold on a social tradition. But certainly the contempt the papers often showed toward their customers hastened along the decline once it started coming, and it certainly should be noted now, as the papers whine about being buffeted by winds everyone knew was coming.

The Chicago Tribune, for example, was always quick to editorialize against the public interest when it came to Tribune Company profits. One of my favorites was a editorial campaigning for relaxed TV ownership restrictions by the FCC. “Far from consolidating, America’s mass media are fragmenting, and at a cost to society,” the paper wrote from on high. “Despite their faults, the media provide a commonality of experience, a unifying thread. Without strong voices to bind us together, there’s danger that we may splinter as a society into small racial, ethnic, economic and other groups.”

A multiplicity of voices is of course democracy in action, and solitary strong voices are an invitation to fascism. I always though that that was a strange position for a newspaper to take, and I’ve always remembered that editorial as a glimpse of the devils who sat behind the paper’s facade.

Most readers are smart, though, and they could ignore such stuff. It was harder to ignore the fact that a lot of what the papers published and dumped on their porch each day just wasn’t very interesting. Over the years, too many staffs had the initiative beaten out of them by layers of bureaucracy.

Here’s a story, anecdotal but true. I interviewed a few times, some years ago, at a fairly well known metro daily. At the time, I had noticed in Billboard that Clear Channel (this was before it changed its name to Live Nation), the concert promotion arm of it, was being sued by a local suburb for not paying its taxes on a concert shed.

It wasn’t a big story or anything, but Clear Channel was pretty well known back then for brutish behavior like that. Here was a company that was raking in concert bucks from local consumers, charging exorbitant fees for everything from parking to nachos, and slapping ads on everything in the venue that wasn’t physically moving—and it was cheating on its taxes in the small town where its venue was located. You had folks’ interest in Clear Channel, the good-government aspects, the pop culture angle, and the potential for at least a little “Hey didja see the story about …” action.

Anyway, one time when I was interviewing at the paper over the course of the day I brought it up. I mentioned the story to the paper’s pop critic, and said he should do the story. I mentioned it to the paper’s arts editor. I told the editor of the paper about it, too, and the managing editor.

I don’t need to tell you that none of the four followed up. And again, this was a suit. It didn’t require any investigative reporting, just a visit to the courthouse, a quick interview with aggrieved city officials, and few calls to Clear Channel that the company wouldn’t have bothered to respond to.

Again, it’s anecdotal evidence, but it’s a powerful example of a major contributing factor to the decline of newspapers: The thoroughgoing timidity—nay, the positive lassitudinousness, if that’s a word—of their staffs. The paper continued to do interviews and stories promoting the acts that played the venue; those were fed to the operation by publicists. But it didn’t have the wherewithal to do actual news.

Now, this is a side issue to Carr’s point—the same timidity that produced that permeating languor extended to new hires, so it’s not necessarily true that some of the younger, cheaper talent will be any more aggressive, or even if it does that the remaining timid editors won’t drain the energy out of them soon enough. But let’s not forget that buyouts are specificially designed to get deadwood out the door.

The WSJ reports that Ticketmaster is “experimenting” with eliminating fees:

Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. said Monday that it has started experimenting with the sale of concert tickets without the addition of so-called convenience charges — the widely loathed fees that have stoked consumer backlash against the ticketing giant for years.

The announcement came less than two weeks after the company hired as its chief executive Irving Azoff, the veteran music-industry talent manager whose biggest clients, the Eagles, are also the first act to sell tickets without fees. Mr. Azoff had vowed to make the ticketing giant more friendly to consumers and artists.

Now, this situation is complicated because of Azoff’s involvement and because of his client base’s presumably close dealings with the company from here on in. The Journal story rather sloppily says “without the addition” of the charges, but that’s plainly silly. From the point of view of the Eagles/Ticketmaster borg, you can charge people $200 for a concert ticket and tack on $45 in ticket fees, or you can just sell $245 tickets and divide up the money the way you usually would behind the scenes—but get the added benefit of tootling a horn about “no ticket fees!”

Things will be different when it comes to acts that have an arms-length relationship with Ticketmaster, and of course with venues, which are accustomed to getting, in Sopranos terms, a taste of the fees. It’s not just tradition; that’s how Ticketmaster has kept its monopoly agreements with the venues. The real purpose of the ticket fees is to create a slush fund for kick backs to artists and venues…to preserve the institution of the ticket fees.

With Live Nation having broken off relations, Ticketmaster can’t afford summarily to cut off that cash flow to its allies, so it’s hard to imagine the chunk of change involved not continuing to play a role. (On the other hand, it’s possible that the concert industry is going to be suffering along with the rest of the economy for the next year or two, and that this is seen as a good PR move. Mitigating against that is the fact that tucking the fees back into the ticket price will have the effect of seeming to increase ticket prices, or at least make them higher than they would otherwise be.)

But there are at least two other reasons this seems like an idea that won’t work. For one, advertising that some shows are without ticket fees just calls attention to the ones that still have fees, right? The fees’ genius is that by the time the big AC/DC show rolls around, their memory has faded. Why start reminding people about them?

More importantly, the economics of concert-ticket sales has certain idiosyncrasies. Music fans don’t care where an act is playing or who is presenting it; even if they did they don’t get a choice; and, the key thing, the product being sold isn’t a concert per se: it’s a Radiohead concert, or a Jonas Brothers concert. The consumer isn’t going to throw over Colgate for Crest because of price issues.

The only issue with ticket fees is the lack of upfront disclosure to consumers about the actual price of the product they are buying. Local jurisdictions should just have laws saying that the advertised price has to be the full practical price of the tickets. As for the folks who’d pay $245 to see the Eagles in the first place? They’re on their own.

Nikki Finke agreeably posts that The Dark Knight is hitting the $1 billion mark in worldwide receipts. This is an entirely meaningless benchmark in the world of Inflated Hollywood Play Money™.

On Box Office Mojo’s all-time corrected-for-inflation chart for domestic releases, the film—whose box office has been endlessly bloviated about this year—appears not in the top five, ten or even twenty, but rests at 27, below such forgotten blockbusters-of-their day as Grease and Thunderball.

The impact of rising ticket prices are harder to assess in worldwide charts, but they are skewed even more by the changing efficiencies of timed global releases. On that chart, Dark Knight currently resides at number three, but a cursory look finds at least ten more films whose worldwide box office probably surpasses it. But box office stories are a lot less interesting when the news comes down to, “Well, it’s about as big as The Sixth Sense.”

Hitsville’s suspicions about Girl Talk—detailed here and here—have been about the lame way Greg GIllis has been ripping of other peoples’ songs and trying to pose as a collagist. Wary of the legality of his mode of operation, he’s focused on live shows, where he collects tens of thousands of dollars for basically hosting a dance party and playing the music of others off his laptop.

Now we can see what this soi disant bad boy—label name: Illegal Art—is really in the business for: The Daily Swarm has the news that he’s now done an “I’m a PC” for Microsoft:

Note that the ad lets Gillis natter on about the “transformative” nature of his work even while carefully not using any of the untransformed extended pop samples that characterize his music-making.

Posing as an artist; posing as a radical; shilling for a crappy software company; being dishonest about what it is he does—he’s a PC!

———–

Previously in Hitsville:

More talk about Girl Talk

Girl Talk: Walking a thin legal line

The newly merged Sirius and XM have a new print PR campaign, heavy on the celebs:

Will satellite radio survive? The companies used to gain four million or so new subscribers a year; now they’re estimating half that. Howard Stern hasn’t been heard of in months, if not years; this is anecdotal, but I don’t think I’ve had a conversation with the words “satellite radio” in it in more than a year myself. I can’t offhand think of a single friend not actually working in the business who subscribes to the system. Look at that ad; is Jamie Foxx a draw to spend $15 a month for radio?

Below the big pictures you can see the company is now boasting of 35 million “listeners,” which translates to “18 million who actually pay us money.”

Below that, there’s a list of other features of the system; I can’t speak of the value of sports packages, but in the music world, at least, the draw of satellite radio dims by the day. All AC/DC or all Zeppelin radio? How hard is it to do that on your iPod? As for the celeb DJs, like Little Steven or Bob Dylan, the novelty will soon wear off for all but the most dedicated fans; as the PDs of the many corpses of stations that tried to give “real music fans” tasteful and challenging programming have discovered, there’s really not much of a market for music people aren’t familiar with.

The one thing that everyone wants in their cars is a Tivo for radio, which would capture “Morning Edition” for you, or “This American Life,” or Dylan’s satellite show, and allow it to be played back at the driver’s convenience. But that’s the sort of sector revivification that would require the entire industry to work together in a forward-looking, consumer-friendly way at odds with its colorful history.

Sirius stock is trading now at about 27 cents; or about one 26th of the $7 average it had, long ago, in 2005. It seems like the merged company has one trend and one hope on its side. The trend is the one away from terrestrial radio of the Clear Channel variety, whose growth remains stagnant and whose quality continues to erode. The hope is that Sirius’s aggressive courting of the automotive industry will make the service somehow de rigeur with a car purchase. The most recent WSJ story ($) on this angle reported that the good news is that Sirius XM now says its radios are being pre-installed in 50 percent of new cars. The bad news is that’s just 45 percent of American cars, and that that number, like its new subscription rate, is dropping fast.