The First Echo

2011 was what I consider The Year of the Departure.

Oprah, Regis, Meredith Viera, and Susan Lucci all said goodbye to their daytime audiences. Katie Couric peaced out on the CBS Evening News. Harry Potter finally bid adieu to Hogwarts. The Walker clan danced into that good night on Brothers & Sisters (to Lady Gaga no less). Steve Jobs and Amy Winehouse left us too soon. And yours truly left a comfy position at Anonymous Content after four-and-a-half years of working in commercial production. It seems like wherever you turned, someone was embarking on a new chapter of his or her life, whether voluntarily or not, in the first year of this new decade.

Joining the unemployment ranks, I did what any jobless/freelance schmo would do - buy an iPhone 4, go to Vegas, and accumulate enough fast-food receipts to form a sizable pile on my desk at home. 2011 was the year I got in touch with my "inner artist" and attempted to live the life of a writer - whatever that is. In theory, it&…

"When I look back on my life, it's not like I want to see things as exactly as they happened. It's just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way..."

And so begins the 8-minute short film that precedes the long-awaited music video (and by long-awaited, I mean one whole month) for Gaga's personal ode to the city that gave birth to her, "Marry The Night." Upon viewing it a second time - and like most fans and pop culture hounds - I tried to scrape away the make-up and somewhat pretentious direction (yes, she's now aiming for a DGA membership, and from the looks of it, she has a hard-on for Kubrick) to see what the hell is really going on here.

..."And truthfully, the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it..."

However oxymoronic that is, she goes on to tell us, while being transported on a gurney by a pair of fashionable nurses (one with "a great ass"), that memories are killed by trauma, her past is an "u…

Five things about the recent music video debut for Justin Bieber and Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You (SuperFestive!)," the collaboration no one saw coming because, frankly, we were already used to (or prefer) the dozen or so versions of this 1994 yuletide tune from artists like Michael Buble, Lady Antebellum, and that little girl at the end of Love Actually (God, what a good movie).

1. There is indeed something superfestive about a Jenny Craig spokeswoman lip-syncing to a song she originally recorded 17 years ago, back when her current duet partner was a mere fetus.

2. Cheers to the publicity team behind Macy's for coming up with a way to lure more shoppers to its already overcrowded counters and migrane-inducing florescent lighting.

3. As blatant as that Nintendo 3DS product placement is, it isn't as obvious as the soft lighting Ms. Carey is now regularly utilizing whenever a camera is pointed at her.

4a. There's no way in retail hell that a de…