It’s a clip that is bound to rack up a new round of hits on YouTube. Until perhaps the rights holder(s) for the 2000 Christian Bale drama American Psycho asks for it to be removed.

Currently at around 25,000 views, the borderline-NSFW scene features Bale’s creepy character Patrick Bateman rhapsodizing about Whitney Houston‘s chart-topping debut album accomplishments. As he prepares to engage in a threesome.

This unsettling slice of serial killer love was astutely re-pointed out yesterday by LA Times music critic Randall Roberts. Creepier than ever.

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The Los Angeles Times hired Lorraine Ali as their new pop music editor, succeeding Randall Roberts, who will serve as a deputy editor going forward.

Ali returns home to the LAT, where she started her writing career in the mid-1990s under Robert Hilburn. She was a former contributing editor at Newsweek and a senior critic at Rolling Stone.

After the jump is the LAT memo:

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USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism announced the recipients of this year’s Getty Arts Journalism Fellowhips this week. The winners are all fellowship alumni and will combine  efforts on a pop-up newsroom called Engine29. Fellows will publish work on Engine29.org during the week of Nov. 4 to 13–corresponding with the arrival of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 exhibit. Annenberg already experimented with the pop-up newsroom model earlier this year, with its Engine28 project to cover the blizzard of theater festivals that arrived in Los Angeles this summer.

Los Angeles freelancer Ariel Swartley and LA Times pop music critic Randall Roberts are LA’s representatives to the Engine29 team.

Update: Duh, GOOD’s Alissa Walker is from LA too. Sorry we missed you Alissa.

Full list of fellows after the jump.

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LA Weekly has finally named its new music editor. Ben Westhoff, a New York freelancer for The Village Voice, Pitchfork and Spin among other pubs, and an author of two books, one on Southern hip-hop and the other on New York dive bars, has been tapped for the job. Westhoff got his start at the Riverfront Times–which, incidentally, is the same paper LA Weekly music editor once-removed, Randall Roberts came out of.

Westhoff starts his new gig July 12. He replaces Gustavo Turner, who, among other triumphs, helped the paper land Henry Rollins as a weekly columnist, but decided to return to writing full time.

LA Times staffer Melissa Maerz is on her way to Entertainment Weekly, FishbowlLA has learned. She becomes the mag’s lead music critic and will also contribute features to the TV department. One has to wonder whether Maerz didn’t see much potential for upward mobility at the Times after Randall Roberts recently took over the highly coveted pop music critic gig from Ann Powers.

Maerz has a pretty impressive resume. And by impressive we mean we’re jealous. She was a senior editor at Rolling Stone as well as a senior editor at New York magazine, where she created and launched the mag’s now wildly popular blog Vulture.

It’s still pretty early, but we’re going to go ahead and call this one for LA Times pop music critic/editor Randall Roberts. Tweet o’ the day, sir! Glad to see that new job is keeping you busy!

Previously on FishbowlLA: Randall Roberts Named LA Times Pop Music Critic

Current LA Times Pop Music Editor Randall Roberts is taking on a new job — that of Pop Music Critic. The post was vacated by Ann Powers in February, nearly two years after she moved to Alabama and began telecommuting.

Roberts was the LA Weekly music editor until last year, when the LAT hired him away to become Pop Music Editor. He’ll continue with his editorial duties until a replacement is found.

Pictured: Randall Roberts, right, looking vaguely like a serial killer, with FishbowlLA editors Matt Fleischer and Pandora Young.

Memo from the LAT after the jump.

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Yesterday we listed all the people who are no longer at the Calendar Section of the LA Times. We noted it makes the section look pretty dysfunctional. We don’t hear of en masse exits from say the Sports Section. But it’s been pretty consistent at the Calendar section.

The newspaper has sent us a statement saying we forgot to mention they’ve hired people too. Hear that obit writers? You should also talk about how people are being born. Otherwise it’s only half the story.

From Nancy Sullivan:

LA Times Calendar section: The Mass Influx

NEW HIRES (in the same frame):
Joy Press, Randall Roberts, Melissa Maerz, Gerrick Kennedy, Yvonne Villarreal, Nardine Saad, Nate Jackson, Rebecca Keegan, Nicole Sperling, Ben Fritz, Joe Flint, Steve Zeitchik, Julie Makinen, Deb Vankin, Jori Finkel, Amy Kaufman, David Ng

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John Barry, the man who probably did more to make James Bond a household name than Sean Connery, died in New York yesterday at the age of 77. Barry was the musician behind the scores of a dozen Bond films, including “Goldfinger.” He picked up five Oscars over the course of his more than 40-year career, for films like “Out of Africa” (1985) and “Dances with Wolves” (1990). His compositions were often way better than the movies they were in. The piece above is from the otherwise forgettable 1979 film “Black Hole.” The LA Times‘ Randall Roberts compiled a Youtube list of some of Barry’s other great works.

LA Times music editor Randall Roberts took a two-camera cruise with Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, otherwise known as Johnny Rotten. Among other interesting tidbits from the ride, Lydon professes a love for Mexican Viagra, reveals he used to live in the “religious suburbs” of Pasadena, and takes credit for helping to bring about the modern day paparazzi, who he says “had a free hand with us” back when the Pistols were still big news. Lydon has lived just off the beach in Venice for the past 20 years.

Lydon is also profiled by Roberts in the paper, where talks about “Mr. Rotten’s Scrapbook,” a $750 collection he’s put together of “drawings, paintings, photos, poems, scribbles and reminiscences.”