The lovely Ex-Pegasus and I saw Morrissey this weekend at Radio City Music Hall, which was great fun. I love pop stars who cheerfully embrace all of the standard stage conventions of big stadium shows, but ironically. For example, we loved the twenty-foot-high letters reading "MORRISSEY" in flashing red lights that rose slowly up from the fog-shrouded stage, but only because they were set off by invisible quotation marks. The Pet Shop Boys have mastered a similar sort of pop star irony. There's lots of it in Urgh! A Music War. Bono hasn't quite figured it out yet.

My favorite moment was when Morrissey introduced one of his old hits with the words: "When this song came out, there was some controversy. Too depressing, people said. But what's so great about being happy, anyway?" Quick—which one of his songs did he mean?