>> One of the things I'm doing this semester is taking a private voice lesson -- a one hour session, once every two weeks -- through NYU for two credits. Last semester I took a group voice class with my friend Jackie and it was quite enjoyable. I even felt like I'd made a bit of progress; I sang Elvis Costello's "Almost Blue" for the final and the professor seemed to really enjoy it.

I had my first private lesson today, and it managed to completely destroy any feeling of confidence that I had. You see, it turns out, I don't actually sing per se. I sing to myself all the time, but I'm not considering breathing or the way I make sounds or anything along those lines. Once my instructor (a perfectly nice guy) tried to get me to actually breathe properly, and concentrate on making my mouth shape sounds in a non-automatic way, I was fucking awful. And when I say really awful, I mean it -- not just untrained, just awful. Everything my voice has going for it simply vanished. He also had me trying all kinds of very strange physical strategies which, more often than not, just distracted me from doing what he was asking me to do. For example, he wanted me to work more on exhaling continuously and evenly through a set of notes, which I don't normally do; but his device to help me with that was to make me point my finger alongside my face and extend it outwards as I sang as though I was directing the air outwards. All that really did was help to fuck my shit right up.

What also doesn't help is that I seem incapable of making any note called for without hearing it beforehand, so I can mimic it. Nor do I understand anything about harmony or pitch, nor do I know my own range... sigh. I don't know how well this is gonna work out for me, really.

>> My home state has upheld its ban on gay adoption. It is the only state in America which specifically prohibits homosexuals from adopting children. Fuck you very much, Florida. Fuck you.

Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, a conservative civil liberties legal group, hailed the decision. "In this age of judicial activism, it is refreshing to see a court assume its proper role and allow the people to set family policy," he said.

THE ONLY FAMILY POLICY YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO SET IS YOUR OWN, ASSHOLE. You have absolutely no mandate to tell me how, when, and if I should and shouldn't parent. I could walk up to your kid and tell him or her that God is a lie and Satan rules the planet, and you'd be pretty angry about me interfering with your family policy, wouldn't you? So where the fuck do you get off?

If a Democrat wins the White House, I'd better see some seriously determined efforts to counteract this bullshit, because we are unquestionably entering a new era of segregation. We are legally mandating the second-class status of a group of American citizens. WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES NOT GRASPING THIS FACT? I want to play devil's advocate and assume that they don't actually want all men to be considered unequal, but the more bullshit they pull, the more it becomes obvious that they could not give two shits about the Constitution. They'd write their own new one if they thought they could get away with it -- and if George W. Bush gets another term in office, then they can get away with it.

>> I'm thinking about putting this photo in a frame amongst pictures of my friends and family in my front hall. You know, if I had a front hall.

>> OK, so I ordinarily hate Pitchfork's more gimmicky reviews, but this was hilarious: a review of the Daft Punk remix compilation Daft Club with cartoon visual aids. In related news, I actually don't think I like Daft Punk much at all. Sorry, everyone. Does anyone want the copy of Alive 1997 I got for free?

Speaking of things which suck -- I'm re-reading 1984 for a class right now, so I decided to put on the last half of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, songs which were intended for a musical adaptation of the novel. Yeah, you heard that right. They're laugh-out-loud ridiculous, my favorite being "1984" itself. What a chorus! And listen to that funky "Shaft" guitar line!

By the way, as soon as Fluxblog marked me as hosting MP3s, my hits went through the roof. So, uh, hi everybody; sorry my blog's not as good as Matthew's. If you want the songs I've got up at the moment, they're over here. I don't update that often, and I don't like very cool things, so I'm bound to be a disappointment, but thanks for stopping by anyway...

>> Oh my God, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are releasing the two things I've always wanted most from them: a DVD compilation of their videos, and a b-sides/rarities album. Nick Cave's b-sides are often just as good as his album tracks -- I particularly recommend "Come Into My Sleep," "Babe I Got You Bad," "King-Kong-Kitchee-Kitchee-Ki-Mi-O," and "(I'll Love You) 'Till The End Of The World" -- so let's hope it's a double album that includes everything (I think I've checked; you could fit it all on two discs). The DVD (which only runs up through the singles for The Boatman's Call, so three of my favorite Cave videos -- "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side," "Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow," and "Bring It On" won't be on it) will be released March 29th in the UK, and the b-sides album is slated for April... hopefully the DVD will get a Region 1 release fairly quickly, like God Is In The House did.

>> Just to let you know, iChat AV randomly started working for me this evening, and it's quite lovely. If I wanted to, I could have voice chats with various other people in my dorm now. I don't really have any reason to, but it's fun to know I could...

>> I've been forced to do something I did not want to do: The comments threads on almost all of my archived blog entries have been closed. It was the last effective thing I could do to stop comment spam -- I was being very diligent about deleting it regularly, but I was being hit anywhere between six and twelve times a day. It just wasn't worth the effort. So in the future, after a certain period of time, each comment thread will be closed and no further comments can be added. Sorry, everybody. All the old comments remain in place and visible, and when Movable Type 3.0 with comment-registration comes out, we can all have a nice happy community where those motherfucking phenterm!ne and dick-enhancement spams don't drown out the actual conversation. Here's hoping.

(It'd be nice if MT 3.0 incorporated the comments' on/off switch into power-editing mode, so that I didn't have to do each and every entry one by one, but y'know, registration first.)

>> Fascinating profile of John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who I knew absolutely nothing about. To be honest, she sounds like my kind of people. Via MeFi.

>> Ikea-as-video-game walkthrough and cheat sheet. This is fucking hilarious. Via Boing Boing.

>> Jarabacoa (6:43:31 PM): here's my question...
Jarabacoa (6:43:39 PM): do you get a vote in the gay agenda?
Jarabacoa (6:43:51 PM): Are there secret ballots ... or caucuses?
logovisual (6:44:26 PM): vote? Ha! Democracy runs counter to the gay agenda
logovisual (6:44:30 PM): No, it's all brainwashing
logovisual (6:44:43 PM): we each get assigned prominent figures, and we whisper in their ears while they sleep
logovisual (6:45:08 PM): it's working OK so far; mine was some head of programming at NBC and look how that turned out
logovisual (6:45:20 PM): Republicans tend to be light sleepers, though, so we have trouble with them

>> Whoa. Laszlo Soundblox: Embeddable MP3-Playing Widget For Personal Blogs And Web Pages. Basically, it's a Flash app that plays any MP3s you upload, on your web page. That's fucking hot as shit, but it's only a matter of time before somebody gets pissed off at it... Via Kottke.

I've been poking each section of this site back to life for the last few days; if you've got the time to kill, you'll find little microbursts of new info all over the place. Or you can just go on reading the weblog like nothing happened; I'm sure your life will be just as full either way...

>> Weezer are releasing a DVD and a two-disc reissue of "The Blue Album" on my birthday -- March 23rd. Man, I hate re-buying albums I already have, but it's just going to have to happen; I love that album too much to pass up a double helping. (Please, please, please put "Suzanne" on the bonus disc! Please!)

>> Oh my God, this is the best web-created music video I've ever seen: Hey Ya, Charlie Brown! You must watch it right now. Via Cha Cha Cha.

>> Mac-heads! I summon you! I require your services.

I got and installed my copy of Panther. (The babirusa is ecstatic). I did an upgrade rather than a clean install, so keep that in mind -- however, it all seems to be working great, excepting one somewhat major problem: iChat won't work. When I go to click it in my Dock, it bounces once or three times, then stops, and the program hasn't opened. Every so often, I'll get the briefest flash of the "Do you want it to copy your keychains?" message that you get the first time you use most apps in Panther; but then it vanishes before I can move the cursor to it to click it. (It's almost instantaneous). A quick Googling told me to delete iChat's "plist" file and/or to repair my disk's permissions; I did repair my permissions, but it didn't do anything to iChat and the problem persists. A search for "ichat plist" in the finder turns up three different documents --

• com.apple.iChat.AIM.plist, modified on Jan. 26, 2003;
• com.apple.iChat.plist, modified Jan. 21, 2004 (the date of this Panther install);
• com.apple.iChat.subnet.plist, modified Feb. 25, 2003.

Which of these can I/should I delete without making my computer scream in pain? Or will this not solve my problem? Can anyone say? Also, it might be worth pointing out that the icon has the little camera for iChat AV on it, but the program is still called "iChat" in the Finder and on the Dock. Should it be called iChat AV?

(I've got AIM to tide me over in the meantime, but I'd much prefer to use iChat -- I've never been able to play with AV before!)

Oh, and some fucking great Panther news: my long, sad burning saga is at an end. OS X 10.3 recognizes my external CD burner (which I have struggled with since September), and I just burned an entire hour-plus mix CD, which included several iTunes Music Store tracks, in just over a minute. If you'll excuse the colloquialism, that's hella tight, yo.

>> A fantastic suggested speech for Howard Dean in tonight's Democratic debate. Via MeFi.

>> 
(Paul Pugliese has nothing to do with my missing copy of Panther. OR SO HE CLAIMS. The babirusa will investigate this matter further.)

>> Whoa! Feb. 3rd is an excellent day in DVD land -- in addition to the aforementioned Lost In Translation and American Splendor, there's also Ed Wood! Too bad I'm in a self-imposed No Spending Money On Superfluous Crap phase, or I'd be all over all three.

>> New music for you.

Hmmm. Barbelith seems to be having technical difficulties, which is irritating, because I just picked up New X-Men #152 and I'm dying to see what people are saying about it.

School started again, by the way. More on that later, I guess?

Oh, and a call to arms: if any of my fellow comics geeks are in a comic book store in NYC and they see the SANDMAN LIBRARY printings (the ones with the color-coding and the Roman numerals; not the new trade dress) of A DOLL'S HOUSE (Vol. 2) and/or SEASON OF MISTS (Vol. 4), then let me know, because they're all I need to polish off my complete set, and they're out of print and vanishing fast...

>> Two great stories from Dark Horizons: First, what's happening with the X-Files franchise at the moment. My interest in the show has been seriously, seriously piqued by finally getting a chance, over winter break, to plow through my Season One DVD set. If anyone wants to throw $130 at me so I can buy Season Two, then please, go right ahead. And second, and potentially bigger if it turns out true -- a just barely spoiler-y plot description for Batman 5, currently being referred to as Batman: Intimidation, which is a really lame title but go figure. With Christopher Nolan directing, Christian Bale as Batman, and Viggo Mortensen rumored to be in as Ra's Al-Ghul, this one's got half a chance at being awesome...

>> The tilde is so 2003: New York London Paris Munich has a new URL. Yay~.

>> I'm a pretty disciplined Coke drinker, but you'd better believe I'll be chugging Pepsi while they give away free iTunes songs. It's now the official drink of NYU too (can't get anything else in the dining halls), so I can even buy it with my fakey-not-real Declining Dollars instead of spending real cash. It's a win-win.

An unrelated note: Why is my iPod obsessed with Tricky's absolutely awful "Ghetto Youth"? Fuckin' shuffle mode...

>> Simon loves The iTunes Registry. I tried it out twenty minutes ago, and already it has unleashed untold evil into my life.

You see, at the end of the day, I am a curator of my music collection. Nothing gives me more pleasure than the stupidly anal cataloguing of my CDs, my MP3s, whatever I've got. I spent the entire last semester, off and on, manually adding album artwork in iTunes to every CD I legitimately own; after buying and receiving so many new ones at Christmas, I've got loads more to do and I couldn't be happier.

So obviously, something like iTunes Registry sounds awesome to me. But I think it's led me to a "the first step is realizing you have a problem" kind of scenario. When I had the site root through my XML feed, they got me wildly wrong -- "Your favorite artist overall is Guns 'N' Roses." The thing is, a lot of their algorithms are based on genre (it would seem), which I've been very lax about in terms of keeping my metadata fresh and accurate. So OK, I thought. I'll just go through and genre-label everything. It'll be fun.

I have 7,422 MP3s. I got as far as Badly Drawn Boy before giving up.

For starters, genre is kind of a stupid classification system. I mean, I could label almost everything on my hard drive "Rock" or "Pop." I had some trouble with Atom and His Package (Is he "Punk"? I was avoiding such specific genre names in favor of larger categories -- if Ani DiFranco is rock, then so is he -- but that just didn't sit properly. I ended up settling for "Alternative," which I swore I'd never use) and Basement Jaxx (I've got them down as "Electronica/Dance," but really, aren't they a pop act at this point?), but I had the full breakdown once I hit the aforementioned beardo. I mean, what's the point? I almost never think of my music in terms of genre, why should I bother with this?

The insane librarian inside my skull is screaming "BECAUSE YOU MUST! JOIN THE TRIBE! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO BE A STATISTIC! WHAAAAARGH!" And I do; there is something perversely pleasurable in being reduced to a number and hoping it tells you something. And God, I love the manipulation of data. But I'm afraid I've finally hit a wall where that system fails me and points out that 99% of the time, I am just wasting my fucking keystrokes.

Well, I'm off to Amazon to download more album artwork to take my mind off of it. I'm not really sure what I've learned here... God knows I'll probably be right back at the genre thing later. The Dark Side calls.

>> You may have heard about President Bush's recess appointment of Charles Pickering to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court Of Appeals. As this lengthy analysis from back in May should illustrate for you, that was a terrible, terrible thing for him to do.

So: I'd just like to remind everyone that President Bush has been making a concerted, dubiously democratic, and sadly successful, effort to put a man who supported black/white segregation -- and who lied about his affiliation with that cause under oath -- within steps of the Supreme Court. Think about that for a second. If it doesn't trouble you, then I just don't know what to say. Hopefully, by January 2005, there'll be enough decent and sane people in the Congress to take back all the power this man's been given.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention: Bush did this just days before Martin Luther King Day.

Via Ghost In The Machine.

>> Wow, Lost In Translation is coming out on DVD really soon -- Feb. 3rd. Shame about that ugly-ass cover, though. (Ooh, American Splendor comes out that day, too -- I shall finally see it, oh yes I shall.)

>> Is it wrong that, while plowing through my Amazon Gold Box offers, this is the one I stopped to investigate? Suggested age: 6-9 Years. Sigh.

>> Chuck Klosterman on the new pirate culture. Read this.

In the months that followed, I started looking for elements of pirate iconography in American life. And they were absolutely everywhere.

The most obvious example was the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, a film in which Johnny Depp acts like Keith Richards on the Sticky Fingers tour and consequently comes across as the coolest person who ever lived. But this is only the most unveiled example. Daryl Hannah sports an eye patch in Kill Bill. National "talk like a pirate day" (September 19) has become more popular than both Groundhog Day and Rosh Hashanah. In the pilot episode of Fox's new sitcom Arrested Development (which also includes Jason Bateman!), David Cross carouses on a barge full of homosexuals whom he believes—quite understandably—to be pirates. Paul McCartney married a one-legged woman. And perhaps most curiously, post-ironic literary whiz kid Dave Eggers has opened a pirate store in San Francisco. I'm completely serious about this; it's a store that sells authentic pirate paraphernalia (and also doubles as a tutoring center for schoolchildren).

Via Clap Clap Blog.

>> Man, there's nothing I hate more than a "Wintry Mix." Which is, I might add, going on right outside my window, and which has me so cowed I won't even duck across the street for a burrito.

God, I miss Florida already.

>> OK, a mission for you. A week or so ago I stumbled across a site where you could upload an XML feed of your iTunes' library's current status (most played, etc.) which would aggregate it with other users' feeds. It seemed pretty cool. But I bookmarked it on my parents' computer, and now I can't find it again. Does somebody know what I'm talking about, and if so, can you bust a link into the comments? Thanks in advance...

>> Sigh... no more beautiful warm Floridian summer for me; I'm back in New York City in the dull drab gray. To perk myself up, I'm gonna go buy Panther. W00t!

And as a random side note, the cab ride in on the Van Wyck was the fastest I've ever had, with absolutely no stop-and-go nonsense -- did the Air Train really cut traffic that much?!?

UPDATE: Damn it, the NYU Computer Store is sold out of Panther. And since it's $60 more (with taxes) at the Apple Store, I guess I need to suck it up and wait until they get more... man, I hate waiting.

>> If the Spirit rover discovers conclusive evidence that Mars has ocean water before Feb. 29th, Long John Silver's will give everyone in America free shrimp. Uhh... OK.

>> An audiophile's analysis of the iPod, which, among other things, reiterates the conclusion that AAC encoding is superior to MP3. I've got 35GB of 160kbps MP3s on my external hard drive and, by extension, my iPod; I'd love to re-rip them as better-sounding AACs but it would take a ridiculously long time (plus, in a few cases I no longer have functioning hard copies, due to scratches etc.). Maybe I'll start ripping new CDs as AAC files; they can't be shared as easily as MP3s, but I can always convert them if I want to do something else with them.

Sometimes I worry about going down the slippery slope of audiophilia. I want to buy a nice set of headphones, since that's how I listen to 90% of my music, but I worry that the more I learn about sound quality, the less satisfied I'll be with the most convenient forms of digital music. It's an ignorance-is-bliss kind of situation.

I told you there'd be posts like this one. Anyway, this link is via Kottke.

UPDATE: I tried recording Blur's Think Tank in 160kbps AACs this afternoon. Listening to it on my laptop through my normal headphones, I really didn't hear a very drastic difference at all. Complacency wins again!

>> Disney is selling off Celebration, FL, their planned community outside Orlando. I've only been there once, a few years ago, but it fascinated me. Florida is absolutely plastered with meticulously-planned suburban mini-towns (my parents and I were just looking at models in one last weekend), but Celebration took that aesthetic to a whole new extreme. I do wonder if it can be managed as efficiently by anybody else... I just remember that when I was there, I got this bizarre sensation that I had stepped out of the world. The town center has a small AMC movie theatre, and I remember thinking that seeing the same posters I'd seen at the theatre in my town was like an intrusion by something foreign. It creeped me out, really, but I can see the seductive allure of a town like that... via Boing Boing.

>> Top Ten Impossible Inventions That Work -- a list of weird-science inventions that conventional wisdom deems impossible but which may or may not have already been built. Intriguing, of course... via MeFi.

>> Interesting idea -- if developing nations want the U.S. to honor their own free-trade laws, they should do it by "holding Hollywood hostage."

>> Yes, it is official: The Pixies have reformed and they're playing Coachella in May. (As are Radiohead, but those guys are everywhere these days). Also, the birds are singing in the trees, and there's a skip in my step and a song in my heart. Lovely news.

>> Three words: Golden mystery snail.

More later? Fooked if I know.

>> You know, I hadn't mentioned this yet, so I guess I ought to get it out there: For Christmas, I got another iPod. The 40 GB one. Yes, feel free to scream "spoiled brat," I'll wait until you're done. (The way I explain it is, my dad just doesn't seem to think it's Christmas unless somebody gets an insanely complicated techno-toy. We got cameras last Christmas, so what's left? And yeah, it's doubling as my birthday present too, so when you divide the cost that way it gets a little bit more reasonable.)

My old iPod, you may recall, was named Adam Clayton. Why? It felt right at the time. The new one, naturally, is Larry Mullen, Jr. As of now, it's only got 3.6 more gigabytes available, which is really not a lot, but since I now have almost every CD I own ripped onto my external hard drive, I can make those gigabytes last.

And before you ask: No, I will not sell/give you my old iPod. (Everyone I've ever known has asked.) For starters, it'll only work with a Mac. And I just plain want to hold on to it, for a variety of reasons. It's one of the 5GB original models, so it could turn out to be valuable for techno-fetishists down the line. It still works and it still looks great, so I could either use it as a backup or -- don't laugh -- as a piece of decoration; I keep thinking it'd look strangely brilliant if it was matted and framed on a wall somewhere. And really, I just love it too much to let it go. It changed a lot of things about the way I listen to music, and it got me through some hard times. A rich emotional bond has been forged that no man can sever. And as soon as the Massachusetts Supreme Court gives us the OK, we'll be codifying that relationship in the eyes of our families and the law. Thank you.

Anyway, point being, I'm back at the leading edge of the Shameless Consumer Whore vanguard. All future references to my iPod will refer to this ginormous new creature. Entirely worthless quibbling posts about the differences between my new and old pieces of consumer electronics should be coming your way any time now, so get jazzed up now and avoid the rush.

>> The iPod Mini is here -- and IMHO, it's a little bit ugly and a little bit overpriced. But as pointed out on Metafilter, it wasn't made for me: it was made for the people who aren't dangerously obsessed with their music and the manner in which they play it. And I suppose in that sense, it'll rule the world. (The regular iPod has been jacked to 15GB, 20GB, and 40GB models, at the same old $299/$399/$499 price points. Bad news for one of my friends who just bought a 10GB the other day...)

>> Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler have met up for the first time since 1994. Brace yourself for Suede Mk II...

>> Interesting article in The New Yorker about year-end Top Ten lists (via Kottke). Basically, the argument is not that they are useless, but that they are supremely useful, and that the overwhelming plurality of them is eroding the common man's ability to process the media around them:

The (New York) Times published three lists of the ten best pop-music albums. No title appeared on all three lists; three appeared on two lists, leaving twenty-seven top-ten albums. (If you were born before 1980 and have been doing something with your time besides downloading pirated music, you were lucky if you recognized the names of five of the artists.)

This intrigues me. At bottom, it's kind of absurd. If the thesis is that we live in a world where music has exploded into countless sub-genres, it's kind of ridiculous to say that pluralism in processing that world is unwelcome -- it seems to me to be the only tool that could get the job done. I guess I'm less interested in the issues the article raises about Top Ten lists themselves and more interested in the question of how people come by the music they come by these days.

The reason I'm interested is that I'm an extraordinary case. I was born after 1980, and I do do almost nothing but listen to all the music I can get my hands on, in every conceivable form. I am so far off from the average American consumer that it's actually kind of insane. How does my 33-year-old sister find the CDs she likes? How do college kids who don't worship pop music the way I do come by their tastes these days?

In a discussion we had the other day about how music retail was changing, my friend Shane expressed surprise at the idea that big-box stores and the limitations they place on the albums they carry -- i.e., nothing they think is going to sell less than 50,000 units -- is problematic. After all, if a kid likes the kind of music that a niche label like Saddle Creek releases (the kind of CD that doesn't post the sort of sales Wal-Mart is interested in), aren't they going to know about it and be active in that scene already and know how to get their hands on the album? Shane comes from somewhat of a punk-rock background, so I suppose a community-based, inherently activist assumption like that makes sense for him, but it does imply a fundamental shift in how audiences are built. What I didn't say at the time (I think we started talking about celebrity poker or something) is that that's simply not how the vast majority of the music-buying public works, and that shouldn't be how they have to work. You shouldn't have to put a lot of effort into finding music that interests you; there should be distribution channels ready and waiting to deliver it. In the ClearChannel/Best Buy/Wal-Mart music world, there aren't.

I'm haunted by a quote from Steve Jobs in his Rolling Stone interview a month or so back (posted about here) -- "The world needs smart editorial." That's a sentiment I couldn't agree with more. The sorts of things I pay attention to -- music blogs like Fluxblog or N.Y.L.P.M. or Sasha Frere-Jones -- are all smart editorial; the catch is, I had to spend months and years on the Internet poking around, following chains of links, etc., before I stumbled upon a decent and useful number of sites like that, through which I can mediate my contact with the astonishing amount of music that's out there. I guess it's an arguable point, but I don't think Joe & Jane America should have to be putting that much effort into having good music arrive at their ears. So in that sense, this almost naive and romantic view of the Top Ten list espoused in this New Yorker article is seductive to me. At the same time, it's foolish to advocate against having a wide range of "smart editors" at your disposal.

That all strikes me as excessively wordy, and I could probably couch this in more cogent terms, but frankly, I'm too lazy, and I want to go off and find something fun to do tonight instead of re-drafting this. Feel free to cross me off your "smart editors" list if I was ever there; I'm just in the fan club.

>> I love, love, love Paul O'Brien's The X-Axis Reviews (I read almost everything in the site's archives while shaking with flu last month), and I really, really love his summation of this year's X-Books, most especially, of Uncanny X-Men:

Imagine a terrifying window into a dark world of anti-talent.

(...)

This has got to be the worst year any X-Men title has had, in the forty year history of the franchise. If you cast the net wider to the X-books as a whole, I would concede that technically, the final year of Mutant X was probably worse. But it wasn't so bloody aggravating. Mutant X was just stupid; Uncanny X-Men seemed almost obnoxiously incompetent...

God, I love the X-Men. God, I hate Uncanny X-Men right now. Hire me, Marvel. I'll love you long time.

>> Congratulations, Thomas Bartlett; you're a really awful music writer. (It's a Salon article; you probably know the Daypass rigamarole by now). Watch as his entire piece falls apart in his second paragraph:

We've been told for years now that hip-hop has arrived, that it is now the dominant genre in the music business, in much the same way that every day for the last three months an article has appeared somewhere with the news that Howard Dean is on his way to becoming the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination. Hopefully the Billboard stat and the Grammy nominations list will act as Al Gore's endorsement did, and put to rest some of the novelty.

OK, yes, that's true; the music press is full of people who jump aboard ideological bandwagons and trumpet an in-vogue cause they know nothing about.

Full disclosure: I know very little about hip-hop and have only recently started buying the albums rather than just listening to singles on the radio.

You're one of them.

I mean, listen, I'm in the same boat as you. I like the hip-hop I hear on the radio, I bought the Outkast, Missy Elliott, and Jay-Z albums this year and I liked them. This does not, in any way, make me qualified to say "Rock is dead." Who's it dead to, other than music critics with a deadline? Do those people matter? I'm still listening to rock and roll; why should I care if 14-year-old Johnny Fuckwad has lost his taste for Limp Bizkit, or if 19-year-old Snotty McBrat downloaded the Strokes album off his college intranet instead of buying it? Just because hip-hop is on top of the charts, doesn't mean it matters any more than anything else does.

Universal statements are the enemy. A universal statement to take with you today.

Two smaller quibbles: Jesus, Coldplay as second-rate Radiohead? Don't fucking get me started. When, why, and with who did this begin? Honestly?

And dude, Speakerboxxx isn't even an hour long; you say it's an hour and twenty minutes. Way to fact-check.

>> Sorry my Best Of 2003 Albums post has gone AWOL, everybody; at the last minute on December 31st I picked up some new contenders and have therefore postponed the write-up. It'll come when it's ready, like an infant or a good bowel movement.

(Speaking of infants, for context, at pretty much any minute now my sister-in-law could be going into labor with my second niece, so I may have to vanish to Tennessee for a couple of days sometime in the near future. Obviously I'll keep you posted.)

What have I done in the last few days? Well, there's been a lot of time-wasting, and a fair amount of sitting around at people's houses. I rang in the new year by watching Ben play Max Payne 2. It was pretty uninspiring, but ah well. I saw Lost In Translation again. And last night, Paul, Shane, Catlan, Shane's sister and I went up to St. Petersburg, and partook liberally of Blondie.

Indeed: Blondie. Accompanied by about 400 of our closest forty-year-old friends and their cheap-smelling beers, we filed into the... interesting... Jannus Landing (an outdoor venue in downtown St. Pete; it should be great but really just isn't) and watched Debbie Harry go absolutely insane in front of us. There's no other way to describe the woman's on-stage movements; basically, she flails and dances in every way imaginable that doesn't require her to lift her feet off of the stage. I think she was afraid of falling and breaking a hip, honestly.

The show was about as great as semi-nostalgia acts can be; I really hate pigeonholing any long-running act as a "nostalgia act" -- if you try to do it to R.E.M., I'll break your fucking nose -- but you do reach a certain tipping-point, I think, where the age and expectations of your audience become a force you can't overpower and their picture of you becomes the one that has to be reality. It's a sad state of affairs. They played maybe seven or eight songs I didn't recognize, which I'm guessing were mainly from their most recent two albums (1999's No Exit and this year's The Curse Of Blondie, which came out a couple of months ago in Europe but is apparently just about to be released here -- the first single, "Good Boys," isn't bad), and then they played a whole bunch of hits -- opening with "Atomic," "Dreaming," "Hanging On The Telephone," and "X Offender" and later working through "The Tide Is High" (the reason Shane came), "Maria," "Call Me," "One Way Or Another," "Rip Her To Shreds," "Sunday Girl," of course "Heart Of Glass" at the end of the first encore, and a fucking insane version of "Rapture," which was in fact astonishingly good until the (white, jocky, Abercrombie & Fitchish) keyboardist stepped out from behind his kit and began rapping, atrociously, over the bassline from "Rapper's Delight." And then Debbie Harry joined him in shouting "The roof! The roof! The roof is on fire! We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn!" I was biting my knuckles so hard they almost bled. Oh yeah, and bizarrely, they covered The Ramones' "Pet Sematary" (they also played one of their new songs which is a tribute to Joey Ramone, though curiously, they didn't announce this -- I would've paid attention instead of learning this after the fact).

All in all, it was pretty enjoyable. Of course the audience members were all cunts -- two fights nearly broke out over insanely stupid things. What is WRONG with the adults of America? But again, a good time was had, at least by me -- I didn't really solicit the deeper opinions of my fellow concert-goers, as we spent most of the ride back discussing the aforementioned dickhead "grown-ups," the new radio payola, and getting c-c-completely f-filthy. So: Blondie. They're still out there, and they still rock a bit. If you get the chance, y'know, why not?

And now I'm off to do some work on Josh's site that I should've done months ago. Ta.