not because I'm looking for a bunch of {{}}s

Still - that sucks. Hopefully, you are better for good.

Tina, glad you liked the moose. Send me your address & I'll send you a copy.

Aww shucks, joe, insent. I love Woody as well. I downloaded all they had on emusic - but what they hav is not his stand up as much as it is him talking about stand up. Still interesting, but two very different things.

I was a Michael Jackson psycho-fan as a kid and I rediscovered my love of Off the Wall and Thriller at a punk bar in Lawrence thanks to a great great DJ during the summer of 2002. Current-incarnation-MJ freaks me out - but I can't help it, I still have the love of his music.

I also got that Neutral Milk Hotel album....

I kid you not, I have given it to half a dozen people or so since I fell in love with it and it's never right away, but eventually, sometimes five or six months, sometimes two years down the road, they write/call and tell me that it's become an important part of a certain period of their lives. Never fails.

Go Home Productions did the Blondie/Doors mashup. I highly recommend the Christina Aguilera/Velvet Underground mashup. My favorite is "Making Plans for Vinyl" (Tweet/XTC). It's still listed but the mp3 is no longer up. I'll send it to Buffistarawk tomorrow. It's really great. There are a bunch of new ones I want to check out, esp. all the Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Stones ones. (He uses "Gimme Shelter" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash," it would take work to fuck that up.)

I don't remember if I've recommended Jerry Jazz Musician before but it's a wonderful site. Here's a really interesting interview with Terry Teachout about his upcoming Louis Armstrong bio. This part especially makes me want to read the biography. JJM has just asked Teachout about comments (e.g., "amateur appraisals") he had written about several critics, including Gary Giddins, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch.

I know music as a performer from the bottom up. This doesn't mean that I necessarily feel things about music more accurately than what Gary [Giddins] feels or what Albert Murray feels, but it does mean that I have a kind of equipment that allows me to understand why certain things happen, and to explain them in a way a person without musical training can't always do. And if you're writing what I hope will be a highly serious primary-source biography of the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century, I think perhaps you ought to have a musical background in order to best understand what he went through musically.... Put it this way: I speak the language of music, therefore the hard part for me is to translate that discourse into the language of words. And it can be done. But if you don't speak the language of music to start with, then you're going to be fumbling around in a world you don't fully understand.

The way I've excerpted it it sounds kind of arrogant, but taken with other parts of the interview it seems simply descriptive. He says in so many words that music is ultimately about feeling and that musicians aren't necessarily better at understanding that feeling nor at discussing it. His claim is just that, as a musician, he has analytical tools at his disposal and a language in which to express how the music gets a certain feeling across. That was awkward but I hope I made myself clear. Anyway, as a non-musician who loves music and wishes I better understood the mechanics of the songs and performances I love I hope Teachout puts his money where his mouth is and dishes up some hardcore analysis in language I can understand.

Here's JJM's "Reminiscing in Tempo" feature, which asks musicians and critics questions such as "what's the greatest saxophone solo ever?" and "what musical recording(s) changed your life?" Soundclip links seem way more reliable than in the Teachout interview.

I love this comment from Salim Washington in response to the greatest sax solo query:

[A]fter a certain point the level of excellence achieved by some artists is so great, that the profundity of their contribution to the record of human feeling and experience renders it meaningless to subject their work to an hierarchical evaluation that is more akin to a sporting event than an artistic endeavor.

Current-incarnation-MJ freaks me out - but I can't help it, I still have the love of his music.

I feel the same way. Did I tell you folks about how I was at the Roxy, roller-skating (as is my wont) the Wednesday after the not-guilty verdict came in? The DJ played a 12-minute mashup of MJ's greatest hits, and people were falling over themselves to get on the floor. It was an interesting moment.

Joe, you poor thing!

Do you have any suggestions re: My Quest For Punk?

Feel better soon, Joe.

I'm glad to know the Bruno book is good -- his enjoyably thinky blog is named after a Walter Benjamin manuscript and, of course, he's the self-describedly "inessential but, I hope, not entirely irrelevant" keyboardist for the Mountain Goats (his posts on the parts of the tour he played with are here [link] ), so it'd be a real letdown if the book sucked.

Trudy, until Joe comes along, I'll toss out some more classic punk titles. All of these are five star classics.

Singles Going Steady - The Buzzcocks. Perfect catchy little songs all revved up and full of more quizzical angst than anger. Still punk though!

Wild Gift - X. Literate beat-derived lyrics set to hypercharged rockabilly riffs.

Damned Damned Damned - The Damned. The fastest, hardest most purely exhilirating.

The Clash s/t. The only question is whether to get the UK or US versions. The UK is more coherent as an album. The US includes some of their very best singles and rockers. 'Tis a conundrum.

Go Buzzcocks! Choose Buzzcocks!

What Jon said.

Agreed. "Why Can't I Touch It" popped up on the iPod last night, reminding me that the Buzzcocks were the catchiest damn band with chainsaw guitars outside of The Ramones.

The Damned album is great, too.