Watch yourself, Amritas. Not even a dear buddy like you is going to get away with sideswiping Kylie. I know an insinuation when I see one. (Additionally, the idea of a straight guy who’s so busy looking at pious plucked chickens like Brad Pitt and Bono that he doesn’t notice Kylie on-stage is frying my brain serious-big-time. 😉 ) Whether she understands free markets in general as well as she knows how to market herself, I do not know; on the evidence of this particular charity she supports, probably not. But, you know, I’ve been a Madonna fan for twenty years. I’m used to adoring a diva’s music and videos while simultaneously wishing she’d stop offering opinions about what life must be like for anyone with a fortune of less than US$200 million.

Speaking of Kylie…well, we’ll get back to Kylie. I’ll start by saying that, if you’re looking for a song to escape into through your headphones while on an inbound Tokyo commuter train at 8:30 a.m., “Rush Hour” by Jane Wiedlin is a very bad choice. Yeah, I know–the lyrics are metaphorical. Somehow, “Feel it gettin’ hot in here / Feel me gettin’ close to you, dear” does not feel metaphorical when it’s one of the first warm mornings of spring and you’re jammed against a middle-aged salaryman who clearly took his last cigarette puff immediately before boarding. I tried closing my eyes and picturing the video, which was all zooming dolphins and stuff, but it didn’t work.

Oh, yeah, and while I’m on the subject of Jane: Yoo-hoo! Mr. Three-Word-Dismissal? Vacation did not suck. NOT. Five of the songs sucked, but that’s out of twelve. It’s worth it for “Worlds Away” alone, one of the best songs to take a solitary bath to ever.

Now, Kylie, she’s got some good bathtub songs, but her single from a few months ago, “I Believe in You“? Perfection as a crowded-train song. You could say to yourself, “I’m not actually being crushed to death by enough people to staff an oil tanker squeezed into a space the size of my entryway. I’m standing alone in a cage of abstract neon tubing, with such a lot of invitingly cool, dark space around me, singing devotional lyrics and making climbing-ivy hand gestures of serene ecstasy.” It just took one jab from an umbrella to bring you out of it, but it was a nice place to float off to.

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