CORRECTION: This post originally referenced the INXS Need You Tonight video, which was partly animatd. Clearly, A-Ha's "Take On Me" is the closer analogy. Gawker regrets the miscalibrated pop culture reference.

Bob Dylan's much-anticipated Christmas album is out. And — huzzah — it doesn't sound horrible. Still, you can't help but imagine Dylan as a drunken interloper who stumbled into choir rehearsal at a prim suburban church.

Were you aware that Bob Dylan is releasing a Christmas album next month? The story gets even stranger today. It seems Dylan has now inked a deal with the America's most troubled financial institution to help market it:

An anti-war voice has fallen silent, for Mary Travers, a founding member of Peter, Paul and Mary, was felled by cancer today. The singer, whose sullen folksy sound many of you will remember from "Blowin' in the Wind," was 72.

Here's the cover to Bob Dylan's forthcoming Christmas album. Proceeds go to charity; as Vulture notes, this lends hope the project won't be commercially corrupted and critically panned. We still wish the sleigh driver had a harmonica holder or something.

• George Michael is back in the news and, as usual, it has nothing to do with his music. The singer was arrested on Friday for driving drunk when he crashed his car into a truck. Michael, however, is insisting he was sober at the time. So maybe he's just a bad driver? [NYDN, E!]
• Is Joe Simpson trying to push the producers of American Idol to hire Jessica Simpson to replace Paula Abdul? That's the rumor. [P6]
• Amy Winehouse's soon-to-be ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil says the singer has been "begging him to get back together." Uh oh. [DM]
• Beyoncé has been brushing up on her dance skills by "secretly" enrolling in ballet lessons at the Alvin Ailey School of Dance. [NYDN]

40 years after Woodstock, Bob Dylan was mistaken for an escaped crazy patient by Jersey 5-0, and taken into custody of the cop after he was seen rambling the Jersey streets. Oh, man, things have changed. [NYP]

Bob Dylan has been recording a Christmas album featuring songs like "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Here Comes Santa Claus," according to two websites. His career trajectory does seem about at that regrettable stage. The precedents are sad.

Naomi Campbell turns 39 today. Actress Ginnifer Goodwin is turning 31. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is 81. Real estate developer Joseph Sitt is 45. Society dermatologist Lisa Airan is turning 44. Artist Ghada Amer turns 46. Former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw is 69. Alison Eastwood, the actress and daughter of Clint, is turning 37. British tabloid staple, Katie Price, is turning 31. And America's Next Top Model: Cycle 7 winner Caridee English is 24 today. Weekend birthdays after the jump.

Recently two films have shocked the world with graphic depictions of violence followed by acts of sex: Bob Dylan's Beyond Here Lies Nothing and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. Coincidence or zeitgeist? You decide.

• CBS posted a first-quarter loss as the ad recession took its toll. [THR, NYT]
• News Corp. reported a 70 percent drop in quarterly profits. [LAT, B&C]
• Profit dropped by 46 percent at Warner Music during the same period. [PC]
• Sirius XM posted a $236 million quarterly loss and also announced that its number of subscribers declined for the first time ever. [AP]
• Cablevision plans to "explore" a spinoff of Madison Square Garden. [NYT]
• News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch says he plans to charge readers to access the online content of his newspapers in the near future. [E&P]
• The new Bob Dylan album is No. 1 on the charts this week. [THR]
• Felix Dennis says The Week is for sale. For just $200 million. [Folio]

• Carson Daly has two reasons to get wasted today: It's St. Patrick's Day, of course. Plus he and his girlfriend Siri Pinter are new parents, too. [People]
• Jon Stewart's secret weapon in his rumble with Jim Cramer last week? His brother, Larry Leibowitz, is a senior exec at NYSE Euronext. [P6]
• A judge recalled Lindsay Lohan's arrest warrant yesterday after seeing the proof that she hadn't stopped attending a court-ordered alcohol education class after all. Also: She hasn't checked into rehab again despite reports to the contrary. Not yet, at least. [NYDN, OK!]
• Natasha Richardson was hospitalized yesterday and is now in critical condition after a skiing accident in Montreal. [People]

How to tenderize Bob Dylan's "bleak... sneering" new album, built around the song "Life is Hard?" With the title "Together Through Life" and a black-and-white, backseat gay kiss on the cover. (Click to enlarge.)

Bob Dylan's new album of outtakes, "Tell Tale Signs," has some great countrified blues numbers for coping with the coming depression. And in a seeming nod to the tough times, the folksinger streamed the album for free on NPR's website for a week ("Bob Dylan Understand The Weak Economy," said the Times). And yet when the compilation finally dropped earlier this month, aficionados had to pay $130 to get all 39 tracks. That you could buy a smaller, poor man's version for the usual $20 or so was no consolation to hard-core online fans, some of whom vowed to aid and abet piracy in an act of revenge. They shouldn't get too flustered at their hero, judging by Gustavo Turner's review in the Boston Phoenix. You can safely blame Dylan's "mafia" entourage.

"i went home an began writin/a suicide note" [New Yorker, New Yorker]

[Photo Credit: Splash Pics]

Congratulations go out this morning to Paste Magazine, winners of the race to reclaim Scarlett Johansson as the precocious nubile muse we knew and loved prior to this week's grim news of her engagement to marry... never mind. What's important here are her "Five Dads" pervily cited in the magazine's new cover story — Woody Allen, Bill Murray, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and, ahem, Barack Obama. After the jump, if you have the stomach for it, see if you can match the pop culture father figure to Scarlett's eyelash-batting, daughterrific praise. (Bonus points if you can accurately guess which one will give her away! It's even harder than Mamma Mia!)

Artist Suze Rotolo has written a book about her four years as Bob Dylan's muse in the early Sixties. But be warned: "This is about as far from a juicy tell-all as a memoir can get: Rotolo does share some private details of the story of her romance with Dylan-the two met in 1961, when Rotolo was 17 and Dylan was 20, and were a couple for some four years-but her approach is so sensitive, discreet and affectionate that she never comes off as opportunistic. This is an honest book about a great love affair, set against the folk music revival of the early 1960s, but its sense of time and place is so vivid that it's also another kind of love story: one about a very special pocket of New York, in the days when impoverished artists, and not just supermodels, could afford to live there."

"Obama, accompanied by his wife Michelle and the couple's two young daughters, was met with a roar of acclaim as he took the stage to the strains of U2's "City of Blinding Lights." [NYO]

Lord, We thank you another year of witty paternal film criticism by the Times's A.O. Scott. When he likes movies we like, it's like he is personally validating our taste, and that feels good. Also, this is how he ended a review of Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There": "Mr. Haynes is not simply compiling golden oldies. You hear familiar songs, but what you see is the imagination unleashed — the chimes of freedom flashing." Amen. [NYT]