“Freedom of speech applies to everything but our own bodies,” protested Warren Ellis’ provocateur Doktor Sleepless on, of all things, the radio, and it’s true that the one transgression rock’s rebel etiquette frowns on is women staying in the *same* body past 30. But my favorite Beatle is Yoko so most of my main selections over the past year or so were from over-40s, -50s and -60s who separate the boys from the women.

Every good thing you’ve heard about Chrissie Hynde/Pretenders’ Break up the Concrete is true (except “comeback” my arse; Loose Screw and Viva el Amor were each the ideal sound of their respective half-decade, though few people were listening as closely as she was). This one (and my affections) are split neatly down the middle between familiar, tuneful but remarkably lean and un-redundant Career Chrissie and resumed excursions into the welcomely unexpected — especially the airborne last-cowgirl-on-Earth keening of “You Didn’t Have To,” a killer “Rosalee” that sounds like the still belching, grinding heart of the Rust Belt she’s moved back to, and “Almost Perfect,” Hynde’s epic warble of America’s post-pinnacle malaise set to an unwinding braid of entropic art-pub noodling that sounds like something Les Paul will come up with five minutes after he dies. Those are my idea of compliments, and this is my idea of a disk worth paying some of the last of the real money for.

In fact I’m too old to steal anything with authority, but punk urchin turned cabaret drama-queen Ute Lemper’s Between Yesterday and Tomorrow also didn’t leave me wondering where it all went. On this disk Basia meets Kate Bush, triangulated somewhere between the heyday of Bowie’s integrity and Reagan-era Grace Jones’ will to pretension. The gene splice succeeds and sounds great, edging out Skin’s Fleshwounds and nearly knocking off Perry Blake’s California as wimp-rock album of the decade.

They almost don’t *want* you to buy Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Running for the Drum (I finally tracked it down in the wilderness of EMI Canada online), but it’s worth the privilege. To say Buffy’s albums are mixed bags is like noting that Hedda Lettuce is extroverted; technically accurate but somewhat afield of the point. A veteran folkie ethnographer, the self-generated Sainte-Marie is just as much a song-collector, though of genres and styles processed through her own asymmetrical prism, and if that means adrenalized sample-aggro, irresistibly cliched arena balladry and B-movie noire-torch are what she’s been listening to, then you’re gonna be too. The album’s a good souvenir of the gig I saw about a year and a half ago; I’d thought I was going mostly to say I had, having been raised on her records and, me mum assures me, having attended a few concerts prenatally. Expecting oldies, I got two glorious hours of classic-goth seance-folk and face-shredding powwow post-metal by this inspirationally psycho sixtysomething sex bomb, and knew then that if I saw a better gig all decade it would be ‘cuz I got hit by a bus and caught Hendrix in heaven.

But let’s have some optimism for the long haul.

We interrupt the two-part blog series on geriatric rockstars for the inevitable reaction to Watchmen’s opening night. (Though the film’s coffeehouse-oldies score may help fill seats in Leonard Cohen’s curiously concurrent career-survey concert tour, perhaps the most unambiguous good Zack Snyder and teammates will end up doing.)

Anyway, the thing about good-news/bad-news propositions is that they can balance so perfectly that you’re left with not much news to speak of. There’s a lot that’s good about Watchmen the movie — there’s a lot period, so a lot of it has to be good. Moore & Gibbons knew how to deliver both volume and variety, so the nearly-three-hour movie, like the 300-some-pages comic, is hefty without ever feeling sluggish. The film is almost uniformly well-acted (with the already much-noted exception of Malin Ackerman, whom I suspect will now be sent a bouquet every week for the rest of her life from Gabriel Macht). For long stretches of time, Snyder makes Moore’s layered narrative and Gibbons’ eccentric vision come to life more or less intact. Most of this happens before the exact midpoint of the movie, as Dan and Laurie’s romance blooms and nuclear midnight nears, at which point the film starts to fly apart with structural shortcuts and expository dialogue, heading for a load of moralizing and melodrama at the end which has little to do with what Snyder has set up let alone what Moore & Gibbons intended.

Almost from the start, though, there’s a problem of tone. Snyder understand bigness, but he doesn’t really grasp grandeur; every opportunity to be loud and explosive (from Dr. Manhattan’s Martian castle crumbling to Nite Owl’s hovercraft simply appearing) is taken, whether it matches the cerebral intensity that’s all around it or not. And I understand that sex and violence scenes that need only a panel in the shorthand language of comics do have to actually occur in real time on the screen, but with the sex Snyder tends to miss or trample the original comic’s punchlines (I don’t know what could be distracting him), and — much less innocuously — the violence, while claimed and maybe even intended to emphasize the ugliness of combat and show the dysfunctional characters’ delight in bloodshed, is lingered over and amped up in ways that only suggest the filmmaker’s delight; less than a year after The Dark Knight’s photojournalistic terror and The Wrestler’s tragic poetry of self-destruction, Snyder’s collusive, unedifying gore thuds louder than his nuclear blasts.

The Dark Knight comparison is particularly instructive, and I’ll get back to it in a minute. Even when Watchmen works, it works as a near-perfect live-action illustration of the comic, like a Victorian tableau of a stained-glass Bible scene or a cheesy statue of a Monet painting (I spent the day after Watchmen’s premiere at an engagement party in a sculpture garden full of the stuff; the clockworks of the universe grind in mysterious ways, huh?). In other words, at its best the film neither adds to nor subtracts from the comic’s legacy. The irony of this is that, while Watchmen the comic advanced its medium by decades, Watchmen the movie doesn’t move the artform of superheroes on film an inch forward or back. The *other* irony is that, infamously, the possessive fanboys didn’t *want* anything added to the comic. So why make the movie?

As a graphic novel Watchmen is almost universally accepted as a significant work of art, which has now been turned into a film that will be forgotten fast and satisfy almost no one. As a comic Batman has been produced for 70 years across umpteen titles, whose ratio of cranked-out crap to inspired artistry is inevitably pretty high at this point, yet it was just turned into a landmark of American cinema. No one owns Batman anymore in the way that Moore & Gibbons are rightfully inseparable from Watchmen, and a survey and reimagining of Batman’s open-ended canon is more likely to produce an additive work of art than any transfer of Watchmen’s enclosed narrative can. This is what ya might call the real practical joke — that the readymade story structure of a graphic novel is less useful to moviemakers than the sprawling material of an endless serial, and that Robin Hood is capable of generating a more legitimate cinematic statement than Paradise Lost. But it also means that, while there are some comics that weren’t meant to be, yes, watched as movies, there are some that can’t be overlooked in their original form. And as true comic fans, that’s a joke that should make us smile.

From the wizard Shazam to Fat Old Superman in Kingdom Come, age and experience have been respected and beloved in comics. But it’s always been different in rock ‘n’ roll — which of this year’s competitors will you be thankful got old before they died?

Years of Refusal is Morrissey’s idea of hard rock, as much at home in the cabaret as the stadium, and in honor of both Mozz swings for the bleachers and rides the ball into several box-holders’ clavicles just to make sure. Power-pomp provides the soundtrack to another hundred-and-one savagely witty reasons why everyone else in the world is even less lovable than he is. For arch alt-croon, Stephen Patrick Kitten Morrissey is still all ya need — turn on Rufus Wainwright and you pretty much know he’ll drone like Peter Allen off prozac, and Bjork will caterwaul off-key like a deaf person, and Antony will quaver ominously and pronounce f’s for s’s like the Founders, but whenever Morrissey opens that weird open-tuned operatic yap there’s no forecasting what will come out — even on as straightahead a glam-anthem endurance sprint as this. And trumpets. Oh, there are trumpets. Every rocker who reaches a certain age makes this album to show they’re still energetic (or, as with R.E.M., more energetic than they ever actually were), but Morrissey’s the first of them to convince me in more years than *I* care to count.

Morrissey, Chrissie Hynde and U2 earn the loyalty of those younger (and deserve the thanks of those older) by retaining their ability to surprise, so even when they make a sucky album you stick around for them to surprise you the other way. Every advance promo piece on U2’s “reinvention” had led me to expect a reprise of the undercooked Pop. But where that disk’s guiding principle was mere haste, No Line on the Horizon’s is informed instinct. And when you’ve stuffed your head with as many influences and attitudes as these guys, it turns out your instincts can be pretty good.

These days, like Bowie, the band is at its best as colonists and commentators on some currently defining style. The emotional amplitude (and sometimes the language and instrumentation) of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb showed they’d been listening to an awful lot of the Rock en Espanol that so often sounds like them anyway, to passionate and pioneering effect. On No Line they spin the dial to the club-rock sound that’s background music for every reality show people watch and the garage-rock aesthetic that satellite deejays like Little Steven have turned into an old-guy underground; the resulting mix is really rather more than okay.

It’s a mixed bag too, but of Olympic dives and wipeouts, not of happy accidents and hardly-trying like Pop or Rattle and Hum. A lot is recognizable from U2’s recent bag of tricks, but let’s face it, they’re some tricks; and the newer experimental garnish is kept to a low gimmickry quotient by producer Brian Eno, an increasingly silent partner but the only man they ever go really wrong without. And U2 still occupies choral-rock Valhalla practically alone with classic Van Halen (you heard me, art students). Short of their best but far from their safest; no band that’s lasted this long tries so little to just get over on you and so much to still get away with something.

Next: Crone-Core!