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I'd have to agree with Tom Warren. My current favorite indie record label is also Drag City — home of Smog, Silver Jews, Joanna Newsom, The Fucking Champs, Espers, Jim O'Rourke, The Red Krayola, I could go on.
I Could Go On would be an alright name for a band. But not better than The Fucking Champs.
Tom Warren also mentions Jason Molina. Again, I agree: Jason Molina sings a sad song. Perhaps the saddest song of all. I wonder if Tom Warren has listened to Tom Brosseau, another sadsongsinger on another great indie label: FatCat.
While I'm linking to things we've done…
As we all know, the focus of Stereophile's music section, and rightly so, is recorded music. But in my unsubtle opinion, music writers or just music fans who only listen to recorded music and never see anything performed live, are missing half the ballgame. If the only way you know a certain artist is through their records, then sorry to say, and yes, I know that not everyone lives in a city where they can see live music, you’re only getting half the story. I know critics who've been let go because they basically refused to go out to see live music. They were happy to stay home—hey,…
Business Week writes about the increasingly sophisticated measures stores are using to prevent shoplifting. Okay, but when I was in retail and I took inventory control classes, the experts said the most effective anti-shoplifting measure was the phrase, "Can I help you?"
Maybe theft has gone up because thieves know there aren't any employees near the merch. No wonder Macy's has a shrinkage problem—other than cashiers, you can't find anybody on the sales floor at one of their stores. Well, maybe you can in a big city, but not at the rinky-dink outlet we have here on 34th Street.
Scott Berkun has written a nice essay on writing—or more specifically, on overcoming writer's block. He leaves out the one that usually works for me: Work for an editor you don't want to disappoint. Of course, spending the money before you get the check works, too—although apparently not for everyone.
It may be different for writers who want to create "art" than it is for those of us who write for periodicals. The cardinal rule in my line of work is that I only have the blank pages to fill because some advertiser didn't buy them. Therefore, I have to worry a lot less about creating art…
What a shock, a hard-hitting Slate article—on Robert Christgau's firing, no less. Jody Rosen's appreciation of Christgau is spot on: When he's good, he's brilliant, but he does have some seemingly inconsistent blind spots.
Overall, I give him an A.
"I don't dare open the file you left in my folder," says JA.
He's talking about the master database for the 2007 Buyer's Guide. It's swollen with model names and numbers, bloated with impedances and frequency responses, bursting — absolutely bursting, I tell you — with weights, warranties, and retail prices. I don't blame him for not wanting to open it. I don't blame him at all.
"Ah, don't worry about it," I say.
"Don't worry about it," he repeats.
"It's good advice," I say.
"Richard just finished copyediting the first of Art's opening essays. I don't…
Frederick Crews' Follies of the Wise puts the boot to Freud, creationism, and "peacemaking scientists" who attempt to reconcile science with "improbable claims that are in principle empirically testable."
Crews' conclusion: "The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is, simply, empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether…
Portly? Could be your genes. Beautiful? You may be a genetic lottery winner. Your personality, though, that's probably 80% your fault.
Personally, I blame the media.