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"Fine Canada, You Can Have This One\n\n Even if you never ever watch hockey, you probably watched this one: Canada vs. USA for the gold medal in the Olympics\u2019 final competition. And you may have even liked watching it because, man oh man, this was good stuff. Down 2-1, late in the game, the Americans pulled their stud goalkeeper Ryan Miller to get an extra man on the ice, and with 24 seconds left Zach Parise put one away to send the game to overtime. (Don\u2019t forget!: Two nations, one BORDER.) In OT, none other than Sid &amp;quot;The Kid&amp;quot; Crosby (i.e. the best thing to happen to hockey since mullets) sealed the victory for Canada\u2014which in the end was probably for the better. Is it okay to say that? That they kinda sorta needed that one? They\u2019re Canadians, not Communists. \u2014Daniel Riley\n\nFacebookPinterest060216flamevlrg_5a.widec.jpg \n\nThat Said, From the Department of Poor Word Choice\n\n Dear NBC,\n\nIn the future, when referencing the luger who died by cracking his skull against a wall, it\u2019s for the best if you don\u2019t use the phrase &amp;quot;left an indelible mark&amp;quot; as a description.\n\nSincerely yours,\n\nGQ\n\nFacebookPinterestCarly Simon.png \n\n**\n\n Things We Already Basically Knew\u2014Revealed! Or, How David Geffen Met Your Mother\n\n **So after 38 years of near-Sphinxian coyness, Carly Simon kinda-sorta revealed who &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot; is about, telling British dad-rock magazine Uncut that if you play her newish re-recording of the song\u2014available on her album Never Been Gone, absolutely coincidentally in stores now\u2014backwards, you can hear her whisper the guy\u2019s name. The assumption has always been that the song was a diss track about one of Simon\u2019s many famous es. She\u2019s hinted that it\u2019s a little bit about Warren Beatty (who claimed in 2007 that the song was about him) or Mick Jagger (who sang uncredited backing vocals on the original track) and denied that it\u2019s about her ex-husband James Taylor; other suspects, by virtue of having dated Simon in the past, include Kris Kristofferson, Cat Stevens, and the Phillie Phanatic, notoriously the most self-involved of all professional-sports mascots.\n\nBut it sounds, on the new song, like she\u2019s saying &amp;quot;David,&amp;quot; a fact that multiple media outlets immediately jumped on as smoking-gun proof that &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot; was about record-biz icon (or, as UK tabloid the Sun put it, &amp;quot;gay producer&amp;quot;) David Geffen. A story developed: Geffen, in his capacity as head of Simon\u2019s record label, lavished Joni Mitchell with attention while ignoring Simon\u2019s needs, moving her to put him on blast, soft-rockishly. Case closed! Coffee-clouds dissolved! TV ec Dick Ebersol, who paid $50,000 at a charity auction a couple years ago for a private performance of the song that ended with Simon whispering the name of the subject in his ear, made to feel like a grade-A sucker!\n\nBefore long, though, Simon\u2019s ex-husband Jim Hart\u2014who is probably not the subject of the song, but remains a crucial figure in &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot;-ology, cited multiple times on the song\u2019s extremely thorough Wikipedia page, which also (seriously) features two different solar-eclipse diagrams\u2014popped up to deny the Geffen reveal, and Fox 411 entertainment columnist and scourge of inaccuracy Roger Friedman pointed out the story\u2019s fatal flaw: Simon recorded No Secrets, the album &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot; appeared on, for Elektra Records in 1972, and it wasn\u2019t until 1973 that Elektra merged with Geffen\u2019s Asylum label. Friedman quotes a &amp;quot;friend of Simon&amp;quot; as saying that Simon did feel slighted by Geffen in favor of Mitchell\u2014but not until 1974, when Elektra/Asylum put out both her album Hot Cakes and Mitchell\u2019s Court and Spark. (Friedman traces the faulty timeline back to a November post by an IFC.com blogger, who was in turn responding to a Simon public-radio interview that month in which she actually revealed the &amp;quot;David&amp;quot; thing, but nobody cared, because, y\u2019know, public radio.)\n\nPeople were actually kind of disappointed by the Geffen reveal before it was disproved\u2014for years, &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot; has been a jumping-off point for speculation about the private lives of various personalities who traveled in upper-echelon film/music circles during the 1970s, about America\u2019s astronauts of promiscuity and how they rolled, and when it turned out, or seemed to turn out, that it was actually about Simon\u2019s strained professional relationship with a gay producer, you could actually hear the entire world, or at least the whole Internet, go &amp;quot;Meh&amp;quot; at once. Village Voice music editor Rob Harvilla started Tweeting a string of other unexciting/song-ruining lyric-subject reveals. &amp;quot;lady gaga just revealed that \u2019bad romance\u2019 is about steve jobs...\u2019nothing compares 2 u\u2019 is about lee iaccoca...\u2019I want a little sugar in my bowl\u2019 is about henry ford.&amp;quot;\n\nBut honestly, we\u2019re kind of bummed out that it\u2019s not about Geffen, if only because, for a minute, when we thought it was, there was suddenly a reason to care about this mystery and its resolution. Because, c\u2019mon\u2014it\u2019s not like &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain,&amp;quot; minus the blind-item baggage, is even that compelling of a song. That line about the guy walking into a party like he\u2019s walking on a yacht is a nice bit of description, and the tune itself is catchy in a blowsy, Carole-King-walks-onto-a-yacht kind of way. But it lacks\u2014for example\u2014the impressive emotional wreckedness of &amp;quot;Coming Around Again,&amp;quot; the synth-sloggy \u201980s hit Simon sang from the perspective of a housewife who\u2019s given up hope, a song that basically depicted the institution of marriage as a minimum-security prison of the soul. (Or that\u2019s how it\u2019s always sounded to us, anyway. We sometimes think that hearing this song\u2014which was really popular, despite being incredibly depressing\u2014on pop radio about seventeen thousand times at an impressionable age did more to make us gun-shy about long-term commitment than our own parents\u2019 divorce; there was something about the harmonies on the &amp;quot;Burn the souflee/Scream a lullaby&amp;quot; verse that we found absolutely terrifying.)\n\nMore importantly, though, it\u2019s not like we don\u2019t already know that Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger were not super-conscientious boyfriends in the early \u201970s. The song turning out to be about Geffen was the closest thing this mystery could have had to a man-bites-dog ending. &amp;quot;The fact that &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot; is about business (as opposed to pleasure) suddenly makes that song about 10 times more original,&amp;quot; said occasional GQ contributor and friend of this blog Chuck Klosterman, also on Twitter. This, at the time, seemed totally right-on. There are millions of songs about faithless lovers; the my-label-should-have-promoted-me-better lament doesn\u2019t become a viable pop genre until the advent of hip-hop and/or Aimee Mann. More importantly, if it was a song about the music industry, it was kind of a song about Carly Simon\u2019s vanity, right? About her belief that Geffen should have, we dunno, placed more trade ads for her album or shipped more cardboard Carly Simon stand-ups to record stores or not flown up to Nova Scotia instead of taking her phone call\u2014and maybe, also, her belief that she was as good as Joni Mitchell. (If Geffen was neglecting Simon, it probably had less to do with him or her and more to do with Mitchell\u2014we can debate whether or not she\u2019s ten times the singer/songwriter Carly Simon is, but based on everything we\u2019ve ever read about her it\u2019s hard to imagine that she\u2019s not a ten-thousand-times-squeakier wheel, artist/label-relationship-wise. Incidentally, the second single off Court &amp;amp; Spark? &amp;quot;Free Man In Paris,&amp;quot; a song Mitchell has confirmed is about\u2014you guessed it\u2014David Geffen, with whom she had the kind of platonic relationship that the Facebook status-designator &amp;quot;It\u2019s Complicated&amp;quot; would someday be invented to describe.)\n\nThe above-mentioned Wikipedia page reminded us that Carly Simon has dined out, kind of annoyingly, on the whole &amp;quot;You\u2019re So Vain&amp;quot; mystery for years, seeding the press with clues and hints and non-denial denials, revealing a letter here and a letter there. It would obviously be cooler if she\u2019d never said anything, but we\u2019re not going to fault her\u2014you\u2019ve gotta do something to compete as Carly Simon in an iCarly world. (Also, she kinda needs to sell some records.) The larger issue here, to the extremely limited extent that there is one, is that the scoopy, spoiler-happy times in which we live will eventually dissolve every interesting pop-cultural ambiguity, and that makes us sad. Does anybody really like Alanis Morrissette\u2019s &amp;quot;You Oughta Know&amp;quot; more now that we know it\u2019s about oral-sexing Uncle Joey from Full House? Would it add anything to our enjoyment of &amp;quot;I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won\u2019t Do That)&amp;quot; if it turned out Meat Loaf was singing about his reluctance to watch ice-dancing? We don\u2019t want to get all JJ Abrams about this, but sometimes the fun is in the not-knowing. And as a culture we\u2019re so addicted to meaningless closure that we\u2019re ruining everything for ourselves. When somebody asked Bill Murray what his character whispers in Scarlett Johansson\u2019s ear at the end of Lost In Translation, he said &amp;quot;It\u2019s between lovers,&amp;quot; which is a great non-answer; here\u2019s hoping he never feels the need to offer up a real one. \u2014Alex Pappademas\n\nFacebookPinterestCop Out.png \n\n Blown Opportunities 101: Cop Out \n\n Let us get this straight, Hollywood: You line up VERGE heroes Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis. You come up with a killer idea (Lethal Weapon parody). You get Kevin Smith to direct\u2014and to gin up a fatty feud for media purposes. And it comes out like this? Check those reviews: &amp;quot;Sluggish and formulaic&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;A soulless, witless, landfill contraption that Smith once would have mocked mercilessly&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Desperation oozes from every frame of Cop Out, which front-loads its best joke\u2014then spends the rest of its running time endlessly spinning its wheels.&amp;quot;\n\nHOLLYWOOD, HOW DO YOU BLOW SOMETHING LIKE THIS? GO SIT IN THE CORNER AND DON\u2019T COME OUT UNTIL YOU LEARN TO USE TRACY MORGAN PROPERLY. \u2014Dan Fierman"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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