*The Berlin Film Festival is set to kick off on February 12. Roman Polanski, who will not be attending, will nonetheless submit The Ghost Writer for consideration. The Telegraph reports that Polanski was "delighted" with a recent screening at his chalet in Gstaad, where he is currently enjoying house arrest. Personally, I prefer the Independent's headline.

*In the Guardian, Mark Lawson writes that with the death of J.D. Salinger, "an era in American literature is coming to a close." Two things: 1) Tough argument to make, given that Salinger was a literary (and literal) nonentity for the past 40 years; and 2) Salinger died exactly one year after John Updike. Whoa.

*Not a big Sinatra guy, but this strikes even me as overkill: In the Philippines, you can get assassinated for delivering a karaoke rendition "My Way." Seriously: People are calling them the "'My Way' Killings"; teenagers at family gatherings shy away from the song (and not for the usual reasons); bars have removed the selection from their karaoke books. Karaoke bloodshed, though, is not confined to the Philippines:

In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

*Have you heard of Huma Bhabha, the noted Pakistani sculptor? The NYT's Moment blog picks her as one of the Nifty Fifty. Bonus: Write-up by J.L. Fischer! He calls Bhabha "the art world’s most exciting Dumpster diver." Which is just a hell of a tagline.

*The triumphant return of Sade. Bonus: Ann Powers gives her three and a half out of four stars!

*Roger Ebert tends to wear his politics on his Indie/SAG hat. Yesterday, he posted "To vote, you must get a passing score on this survey." Not quite a literacy test, and not so much condescending as baffling: Does Joe Six-Pack really need to know how many first ladies graduated from Harvard Law? In any case, Tea-baggers take note.

*I haven't seen An Education. This person has and claims it is anti-Semitic.

*Today: Oscar nominations! They're in. Like as not, we'll have a spot of blog commentary from Tricia Olszewski, who's filing dispatches from sunny SoCal. They say it's 70 out there this a.m.; Tricia should maybe bring her editor along next time. just informed me that she canceled her L.A. trip and is, in fact, filing from "snowy D.C."

*Ebert, meanwhile—who's been working hard all a.m.—makes a dece point about Avatar:

If it won, that will be a sad day. Yes, it’s a phenomenon and I loved the experience. But the best film? Not compared to those other titles, it isn’t. To be seen to advantage, it needs big-screen 3-D. A DVD viewing will remove much of its impact, leaving many home viewers asking, What was the big deal?

*Sundance closes; attendance falls for fourth straight year. The New York Times credits this development to the totally epochal "rise of Twitter" in "the digital age." Robert Redford calls it a blessing in disguise:

The recession happened, and suddenly a lot of people around the edges — ambush marketers and such — didn’t show, and that’s fine with me. This place was bursting at the seams. You couldn't get around any more.

*Also, I want to take issue with the premise behind Ann Powers' LA Times item on the Grammy's (and, by extension, "the future of music"). The point of the item appears to be that music will no longer be just about music, but about spectacle: "Music is increasingly enhanced by visual or dramatic elements that deepen or even change its messages; it intersects with other art forms, like dance and fashion, to form more complex statements, and benefits profoundly from the active engagement of fans." Now, leaving aside that Little Richard predates this observation by half a century, and Pink Floyd's giant airborne pig by thirty years, my feeling is that the rock-as-statement-and-spectacle truism is pretty well established. More confusing are the dated reactions to minor award-show gimmicks, including "YouTube video tributes" and "the rise of social media" as evidenced by "Bon Jovi playing a song requested by fans over the Internet." (The Internet!)

Mainly though:

These perennial realities have now thoroughly transcended the idea that the literary, privately absorbed version of music — exemplified by the records that played on the gramophone that is the Grammy symbol — matters most.

1) The armchair-listening vs. concert-going rumpus was not resolved on Sunday night.
2) Kids these dayz don't know what a gramophone is, Ann. They're too busy sending Bon Jovi IMs with their minidisc players.

1. Area Code: The term “DMV,” brought to you by the hard work of local rappers. And phone cards.
2. Post Profile Brings Up Touchy Subject: What Claim Do Writers Have on Their Bylines?
3. Meet New Moon Cast Members at Fair Oaks Mall
4. Das Racist Goes After Sasha Frere-Jones For Being White ‘N’ Educated
5. Creed Was Never Underrated

Ann Powers, meet Ann Powers.

Ann Powers, you were the subject of a good profile by Ylan Q. Mui in the Oct. 11 Washington Post Magazine. Your real name is Jayne Lytel, and you chose your blogger handle by mashing together your middle name and your grandmother's maiden name.

Ann Powers, you are the rock critic for the Los Angeles Times, a writer so prized by your employer that you have kept your job despite having recently relocated to Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Ann Powers the rock critic, who I soooorta know—I have met her and used to work with her husband at Spin—wasn't jazzed about the existence of Ann Powers the blogger. "I know Ann Powers is a fairly common name," she writes in an e-mail, "and apparently the blogger in question has a legitimate claim to it...but still.....it seems like an odd choice."

Or maybe not, Ann Powers the rock critic continues, "given the possible Google hits for someone using a name — mine — that's already all over the Internet and which is associated with often-searched subject like Michael Jackson and 'American Idol' and other things pop."

I've called and e-mailed Ann Powers the blogger for comment but she hasn't replied. I'll update when/if she does!"I'd never heard of her before," says Lytel of the Times' Powers. "I was just so excited to have a name that meant something to me."

In an e-mail, Mui says she came across Ann Powers the rock critic's name when first researching Lytel's blog, and that she's surprised the rock critic "even read it! But not sure why it would be relevant to list the coincidence. It doesn't strike me as a very uncommon or unlikely name."

For some writers, the odds of someone with the same byline popping up are roughly the same as Michael Pollan joining the board of Monsanto. The Washington Post's J. Freedom du Lac is known as Josh du Lac to his friends (a group that includes this writer, who is confident his own byline is safe from blogger incursion). The fancy byline, du Lac says in an IM, came because an assistant sports editor at the Sacramento Bee, where he was an intern in 1993, "knew my middle name was Freedom – kept calling me that – kept telling me to use it in my byline....Eventually, after I got hired on, I decided to just change it."

Mui, who has a rather excellent byline as well, says she uses a middle initial not to distinguish herself from another Ylan Mui—even among other people of Vietnamese descent, she says, her name is"pretty unusual"—but because "my name means something all together, so I don't want to drop any part of it! But sometimes editors or whoever forget to stick it in. I'm not too fussy about it but do prefer it!"

But even if your name is statistically more probable than "J. Freedom du Lac" ("Ann Powers," for instance), you may have a claim against someone operating in the same field, says Alice Neff Lucan, an expert in media law whose name is also marvelous. She points to Chapter 1, Section 106a of the Copyright Law of the United States, which says the author of a work of visual art "shall have the right...to prevent the use of his or her name as the author of any work of visual art which he or she did not create." "Visual art" does not include an "electronic publication," however, a definition Lucan says she doesn't trust.

If a blog could be considered a work of art, this possibility is raised, Lucan says (remember, Ann Powers the rock critic is a blogger as well). There's also "the tort of false light invasion of privacy," Lucan says. If a court were to find that Ann Powers the blogger's blog cast Ann Powers the rock critic in an unfavorable light, Ann Powers the rock critic may have a case. "I don't think that's a slam-dunk case," Lucan cautions.

Not that Ann Powers the rock critic is particularly inclined to pursue legal remedy. She says that she thought Girl on the Brink was "close to home," so she put it to her Facebook friends. Some "thought maybe I should take action, but...most were like, no big deal."

"I don't know if it's a big deal," she says.

Lytel says that since the profile ran, not much has changed for her professionally. "There’s a lot of guys who’ve come out of the woodwork offering to buy me a drink—or more," she says. "But I still don’t have a full time job or a book deal."

But if you got a book deal, I ask her, what name would your book come out under?

Lytel, who says she's sent her agent a copy of the Post story but hasn't followed up, says, " I would lean toward using Ann Powers because I've branded the name with Girl On the Brink, and I'd want to extend the brand beyond the blog."