Why the hell are we still putting up with bland network programming censored by standards that haven’t been upgraded in 50 years? The Sopranos, Entourage, Nip/Tuck, The L Word…the best shows on TV all have the freedom to do basically whatever the hell they want. Just imagine how much more entertaining Full House would have been if Bob Saget had been allowed to use his stand-up material instead of the sappy scripts they shoveled on an unforgiving laugh track. We’ve all got cable and DVRs to record shows whenever they happen to air, so please, producers, take your best products off the big networks to media more forgiving of the occasional F-bomb or full frontal nudity. Consider just a few of the unregulated possibilities…

• CSI: Juarez: Forget the glitz and glamour of Sin City — this show follows the real cops south of the border as they investigate murdered tourists, get paid ten times their salary to look the other way for drug kingpins and occasionally report to work to find a colleague’s severed head on a pole. With no rules and characters that mysteriously “disappear” in the middle of an episode, it’ll make you thank your lucky stars you have that cushy rent-a-cop gig at the food court.
• The World Series of Strip Poker: You just know they’d go bare-assed before they’d lose the shades. The producers would need to even out the gender discrepancy a little bit, of course…And for the love of God, Moneymaker, stop bluffing!
• Competitive Eating with the Stars: It’s a game show that’s one part celebrity worship, two parts aggravated gluttony. Can you choke down more hot dogs in 60 seconds than Kirstie Alley? We doubt it! Make sure to save some room to go Manwich-a-Manwich with Stephen Colbert (remember, it’s the skinny ones that can really pack it away). Make it to the finals and go head-to-head with the Great Regurgitator, played by Calista Flockhart.

What you are looking at here is a real live behind-the-scenes shot of Matt Dillon with J Mascis and Lou Barlow on the set of the new Dinosaur Jr video for their song “Been There All the Time.” Dillon, who rocked a brief appearance as a boorish cop in the 1987 video for the Pogues “Fairytale of New York”, is directing the clip. We trust that it will be awesome.

Because we think Matt Dillon is the coolest (check out Erik Hedegaard’s intriguing feature on the actor, which we published last summer) we wish we could say he’s the first actor to get with the actor-turned-video-director trend, but it’s not the case. He’s just the latest in which seems to be an ever-growing list.

Sean Penn made the typically baffling choice to direct both Shania Twain’s video for “Dance With the One That Brought You” back in 1993 as well as Peter Gabriel’s video for “The Barry Williams Show” in 2002. More recently, benefactor to lo-fi rockers everywhere and resident Hollywood hipster Zach Braff directed the video for Gavin DeGraw’s song “Chariot” and brooding romantic Joaquin Phoenix directed People in Planes’ video for their song “If You Talk Too Much (My Head Will Explode).”

Is this a thing now? If so we have some suggestions. Here are our dream collaborations, who would you like to see merge Hollywood with the rock world?

• Johnny Depp directs the Black Lips: The Lips’ unabashedly debauched ways will remind Johnny of the good old days, thereby soothing the pain he feels at never having made good on that whole rock stardom thing. He will also get back together with Winona.
• Jack Nicholson directs Bob Dylan: Why not, right? Scarlett Johansson can star, inspiring crazy muse-impressing effort by both legends.
• Ryan Gosling directs The Hold Steady: This Oscar nominee doesn’t want to be seen as too slick too fast. The Hold Steady will reinforce his intellectual-but-not-dorky cool, and Gosling will bring the less lame starlets the band’s way.
• Maggie Gyllenhaal directs … anybody she wants: Everything Maggie does is cool.

Yesterday Nine Inch Nails released a concert DVD entitled Beside You in Time. We thought this meant we were getting a day off from this whole Year Zero Project, but some eagle-eyed NIN message boarder noticed that on the Blu-Ray Edition of the BYIT packaging, in expiration-date lettering, read the words “Secure,” “Broadcast,” “Informatics.” Add a “.com” and voila: www.securebroadcastinformatics.com.

The page resembles a futuristic Yousendit in disrepair. Reconstruct the scrambled puzzle pieces, enter the password “matt26:45-46″ (an appropriate Bible passage) and another site pops up: www.solutionsbackwardsinitiative.com/pilgrims.

With the next site, Trent and the YZ crew have engineered a time capsule from the Year Zero (fifteen years from now). We learn that books are banned, perhaps the reason many of the project’s websites feature hidden text. This time it’s John Milton’s anti-censorship plea Aeropagitica. We also learn that the site operates illegally, as a means for the people of the future to catalog and spread banned art. There’s likewise a bunch of Quantum Physics talk, but that’s out of our ballpark. Maybe one of you is an expert in the space/time continuum? Help us out. What does it all mean?

[Thanks to the NINHotline]

Loner kids are different than anti-social birds, even if they both have black hair.

• Someone do something about this Norah Jones situation. The piano princess is enjoying another week at Number One on the charts. Admittedly, this week was not a good one for record sales (Fall Out Boy sold 79,052 copies of Infinity On High, a 33 percent drop since last week, and still managed to earn the Number Three spot). Jones only had to sell 99,825 copies of her album Not Too Late in order to score the top spot, but still. Everyone: Buy Arcade Fire’s album next Tuesday.
• Britney Spears is reportedly in treatment for Post-Partum depression, or bipolar disorder. We were wondering what the official culprit behind her zany behavior was. Now we almost know.
• Kelly Osbourne freaked everybody out when she announced — at an AIDS charity benefit — that one of her family members has H.I.V. Now her cousin Terry Longden, has reportedly outed himself as the one suffering from the disease.
• Oops. All those in attendance at a Valentine’s Day bash celebrating Beyonce’s cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (like Leo DiCaprio) should see a doctor, pronto. The event was catered by Wolfgang Puck, one of whose employees was recently diagnosed with Hepatitis A. Eew.
• Ryan Adams has announced a release date for his new album, Easy Tiger. We’ll be halfway into 2007 by the time this album comes out on June 1st. Could everyone’s favorite tormented troubadour be slowing down? Maybe he’s just taken the time to make Easy Tiger really awesome. Though the final sequence of tracks if not yet finalized, these songs will appear on the album: “Goodnight Rose”, “Everybody Knows”, “The Sun Also Sets”, “Halloween Head”, “Off Broadway”, “Two Hearts”, “Tears Of Gold”, “These Girls”, “Two”, “I Taught Myself How To Grow Old”, “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.”, “Rip Off”, and “Pearls On A String”.
• According to TMZ Paris Hilton may spend 90 days in jail. The heiress was allegedly arrested last night for violating the terms of her probation (she was arrested on September 7th for DUI in Hollywood) after cops stopped her speeding down Sunset sans headlights.

Congratulations, Sundance! After you sang “Mustang Sally” on last night’s American Idol, Paula proclaimed, “That’s like the best vocal I think we EVER HEARD!” Well put, Paula. She’s crazy, obviously, but it was a whole lot better than “Nights in White Satin.” Sundance has learned what side his bread’s buttered on, and he took the lead last night by giving the old ladies at home what they want: a nice husky Southern boy with good manners (he even calls Ryan Seacrest “sir”), lots of Bo Bice winks and a King Tut beard. The other dudes are still struggling, probably realizing it doesn’t matter since Lakisha Jones is going to roast them all. Howard Jones look-alike Blake Lewis did his “vocal turntablism” on a version of Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity,” but he was more fun last week with his blatant Morrissey imitation. (Request for Blake: “I Know It’s Over!”) Chris Sligh, still doing the Jack Osborne class-clown shtick at 28, revealed he’s married to an apparently real nice girl, but he’s still grating. A.J. Tabaldo’s voice is like a lard bath, but it’s never going to win him a date with Antonella. So who’s going home?

1. Brandon Rogers. After singing a colon-unloadingly terrible version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” he patiently explained to the judges that it couldn’t possibly suck, since (a) his grandma was very nice, (b) it was his dad’s birthday and (c) “I was trying to feel the song and give it to you.” Eeeewww.
2. Sanjaya Malakar. We love him — he’s the Indian El DeBarge — but the best thing he has going for him is his hair, and last night he hid it under that Michael Jackson fedora. His version of Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” was his way of pleading, “Let me go home, America. I miss my sister. And I left school and got my GED but maybe it’s not too late to try the SAT’s again?”

If you ever wanted to see Timbaland’s home movies, now is your chance. The video for “Give It to Me,” the producer-turned-rapper’s first single off debut solo album Shock Value, is essentially a montage of web-cam-esque shots of Timba and his collaborators — Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake — interspersed with tedious, poorly shot onstage footage. Sometimes a limo rolls by or JT laughs at something we must assume was funny. That’s it.

We were hoping a kick-ass video could save this song for us, but instead we’re feeling even more skeptical about this record. Let’s hope the Hives collaboration rocks…Do you think this clip helps or hurts the song?

You can’t take it anymore. There’s this one song, on this one album, which keeps the record from being perfect. Every time you reach for it (or scroll to it on your iPod) this feeling of dread descends. It’s like, you love Blonde On Blonde, but does it really have to start with that annoying “Rainy Day Women” song? (For us the album starts with “Pledging My Time.”) You are able to go back and edit that one album so that the offending track is removed. Which record do you go after, and what song do you kill?

• The Oscars = a dangerous place filled with violent celebrities. According to TMZ, P. Diddy is being investigated by the L.A.P.D. for allegedly socking a real estate broker (whose girlfriend he was supposedly chatting up) at a post-Oscars bash. Meanwhile, normally mild-mannered British balladeer James Blunt may have mowed over an innocent bystander while trying to leave a pre-Oscar party. Blunt claims it was just an obnoxious photog’s foot that got accidentally run over.
• Oscar winner Martin Scorsese plans to celebrate by … making another movie. (Yay). Scorsese is allegedly working on a new rock-related project The Long Play with Departed screenwriter William Monahan. Mick Jagger’s Jagged Films will apparently coproduce the film, which will apparently examine the history of the music business through the eyes of two industry-affiliated friends.
• Trey Anastasio plead not guilty yesterday in Ft. Edward, N.Y., to drug charges resulted from his infamous December 15th run in with the cops.
• Kelly Clarkson’s new album will apparently be titled My December. In between giddy accounts of her time at Daytona Clarkson found time to describe the record as “intimate, raw, personal” and “rock,” adding that “some [songs] are very sweet and soft.”

Overdue market correction or massive suicidal crash — by any term, the 415-point Dow plunge yesterday was the steepest drop in five years. Is it over? Our playlist thinks not…

• “Stock Market Crash” – The Junipers
• “The Great Collapse” – Nine Inch Nails
• “Sell, Sell, Sell” – Barenaked Ladies
• “Invest in British Steel” – Guided By Voices
• “Ain’t Hit Bottom” – Kellie Rucker

One of the most common ploys to boost ratings on a struggling show is to hype the impending death of an important (yet somewhat unloved and completely replaceable) character. But the networks have mostly wasted this golden opportunity by operating on too small a scale — stealing a page from the comic book model, they should make the kill-off a huge universe-wide event.

The answer is The Executioner — a hit man or serial killer who travels from show to show, knocking off characters past their sell-by date as he goes. Another week, another unsolved homicide. They could get anyone to play him, really, as long as it’s Ray Liotta. (He’s got some spare time on his hands now anyway.)

We all have specific characters we’d tune in to watch die. Our humble suggestions (don’t make us beg): (more…)

As Ray Davies and Debbie Harry took the stage at last night’s Tibet House benefit concert to lead the audience in an acoustic sing-along of “Lola,” members of the rapt crowd exchanged incredulous glances, doubting that the evening could could get any fucking cooler.

And then it did.

Michael Stipe and Patti Smith — just two of the heavyweights on hand to celebrate Tibetan culture at Carnegie Hall’s seventeenth annual shindig — launched into a rendition of “Everybody Hurts” that made everyone watching a little verklempt. But before anyone had time to wipe their eyes, Stipe unveiled “Chorus and the Ring,” a never-been-played-live tune inspired by a chat he had with William Burroughs about Kurt Cobain. Don’t you love it when pop culture comes full circle?

And so it went for two-and-a-half hours. One icon set the stage for the next — Harry introduced Davies as one of her “all-time idols” — and artists played stripped-down mini-sets that treated thirsty ears to killer one-off performances.

Highlights included Lou Reed’s curmudgeonly grumble on the pissed-off “Ecstasy,” Ben Harper — backed by a string quartet — belting out a mournful “Amen Omen” and Debbie Harry jamming on an unplugged “Heart of Glass.” Also awesome: Patti Smith paying homage to George Harrison (who would have turned sixty-four on February 25th) with a slow-burning “Within You, Without You.”

And then the motley crew of musicians stormed the stage for the finale, urging everyone out of their seats with Smith’s “People Have the Power.” No one dared to keep still.

Seventies rockers Deep Purple recently told their fans not to purchase their re-released-without-permission crappy live album NEC 1993, citing it as “one of their worst ever concerts.” The album was later withdrawn from circulation.

Deep Purple, we appreciate the honesty.

If only all artists were as truthful, owning up when a stinker album slips through the cracks. Deep Purple’s gesture got us thinking: Which albums by great artists should come with a sticker, like Parental Advisory, warning listeners that the music within isn’t that good? We picked ten, add your picks to the record…who knows which band will comply. (more…)

It may start as a fashion statement, but those long bangs and dark clothes can quickly mean danger.

• What do Korn, Damien Rice, and every cover band ever have in common? A less-than-stellar cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” Are we being harsh? Watch Korn’s “MTV Unplugged” rendition for yourself.
• Boston Police Department, be on alert. Rapper El-P is joining forces with Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim guys for the video of his song “Flyentology.”
• “The only crime I’m guilty of is being a young black woman,” explains Foxy Brown as she justifies her recent Florida arrest. Since when is faking being deaf to avoid jail time not a crime?
• Too much “Who’s The Daddy?” drama? We promise the James Brown paternity tests will not overshadow the Anna Nicole show.
• The Good, The Bad, and the Queen will play the final show in England’s famed Hammersmith Palais. This might offend some, but remember TGTBATQ’s Paul Simonon was in The Clash, and The Clash were responsible for the venue’s quintessential song “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” So chill.