"I'm not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need," says Barack Obama.

He was answering Jann Wenner's question: "What music have you been listening to lately? What have you discovered, what speaks to you these days?" I wonder what Callas arias are fulfilling his needs these days. He also says his iPod is "heavily weighted toward the music of [his] childhood: "a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane." And a "lot of classical music." He makes a bow to rap music — his personal aid Reggie Love has helped him with that. And "Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things."

Wenner pushes him about Dylan, who recently performed at the White House. He says:

Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played "The Times They Are A-Changin'." A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I'm sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.

He segues on his own to the subject of Paul McCartney:

Having Paul McCartney here was also incredible. He's just a very gracious guy. When he was up there singing "Michelle" to Michelle, I was thinking to myself, "Imagine when Michelle was growing up, this little girl on the South Side of Chicago, from a working-class family." The notion that someday one of the Beatles would be singing his song to her in the White House — you couldn't imagine something like that.

Wenner asks if he cried, and he starts his response...

Whenever I think about my wife, she can choke me up. My wife and my kids, they'll get to me.

His aides make him stop the interview at that point. No crying in politics! Then he comes back a "moment later" and makes a speech to Wenner — "with intensity and passion, repeatedly stabbing the air with his finger" — about how people need to shake off their malaise lethargy.

You think the new issue of Rolling Stone is tough on General McChrystal, but how do you think Lady Gaga feels?

She posed for the cover in a big machine-gun bra and a nearly naked ass and purports to "tell all," yet everyone's talking about McChrystal, whose name isn't even on the cover! Life is so unfair to Lady Gaga!

ADDED: That gun bra made me think of this crotch-gun in "From Dusk 'Til Dawn":

General McChrystal and his advisers spoke to Rolling Stone — "derisively ... often in sharply flippant and dismissive terms" — and now... what?

WaPo reports:

Preparing for a speech he is about to give at a French military academy, McChrystal "wonders aloud" whether he will questioned about the well-publicized differences in opinion between himself and Biden.
"Are you asking me about Vice President Biden? Who's that?" McChrystal says with a laugh, trying out the line as a hypothetical response to the anticipated query.

"Biden?" chimes in an aide who is seated nearby, and who is not named in the article. "Did you say Bite me?"

More quotes from the Rolling Stone article here:

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides. "Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."...

According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."...

Adam Lambert certainly played the gay card well.

In yesterday's post about Adam Lambert, Christopher Althouse Cohen wrote:

Well, he certainly played the gay card well. He didn't acknowledge it but put out plenty of hints on YouTube prior to the show, refused to answer questions about his sexuality after the show was over just long enough to be "in the closet" and therefore able to stage a big coming out thing, used coming out as a way to get the best magazine cover you could possibly get, and somehow managed to negotiate a deal where that very magazine cover would make no mention of his coming out in the article and would appear to just be about how "wild" he is as a performer. On the show, he got all the credit for being out without having to deal with any of the consequences, and now he gets the big cover but gets the appearance of it not being about his coming out. He is quite media savvy and played the game for maximum attention.

Oh, I do like that he acknowledges in the article that he's fat. Bad skin isn't quite as much of a revelation, and people can forgive bad skin, but people act like he's hot when he's quite out of shape and can't possibly look good naked. But props to him for admitting it.

Ouch!