From jazz to mambo to doo-wop to hip-hop: Great story on the vibrant musical history of the Morrisania section of the Bronx

Two very different men commit two very different crimes: This is a fucking outrage

I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract

Last night Maud and I were talking about PEN's Reason and Faith event thingy that she attended. On the record, she had this to say about Martin Amis:

If reading Amis' last novel was "like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating," his new one, about Mohammed Atta, promises to be like being trapped in a room with that same uncle for a week as he swigs from bottle after bottle of Jamesons and rails against the Illuminati.

Look out, Chateau Neuf du Pape, Georgian wine est arrive, and it meets safety requirements! [Via]

BEHOLD! The Gossamer Project! Yust, the 45-year-old "Faery King" who looks disturbingly like Rutger Hauer! [Thanks, Max]

Kevin has posted his (most excellent) recollections of his grandfather, Injun Joe Thompson

What good is organic if it travels 1,000 miles to get to you? A profile of "non-bar code" farming [Via]

RIP, Jane Jacobs

My pink half of the drainpipe

There's this old man who stands in the causeway between the 7 train and the Lexington line at Grand Central Station. He plays the viola for money between 8 am and, like, 8 pm.

Unlike some of the other buskers in the subway, he has no discernable talent. Sawing back and forth with an unrosined bow, he produces a single agonizing, endless free-form tune that kinda resembles "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." It is unbearably sad. He is unbearably sad.

I don't know how he does it for twelve hours a day. He must be aware that he's not very good, although he's not quantifiably worse than most violists. He's clearly there because he needs the money. And so he stands there, hours on end, playing tunelessly.

The May issue of the Blue Ridge Gazette magazine is now online

Ladies and gentlemen: Pre-order your copy of the We Jam Econo extended 2-disc release, early and often

Jim Hanas posits that the trend in exotic baby names has little to do with contemporary "royal titles" and everything to do with not naming your kid after someone you slept with long ago [and yes, I'll save you the time and add that I'm down to two choices: Floyd and Adolf]

All kinds of everything, indeed: will Finland send death-metal band Lordi to Eurovision this year? Oh, I hope so

Hello, geniuses: If you're unfamiliar with Marshall McLuhan, maybe you should get out of "media"

Holy cow, Junot Diaz comes out of hiding! [Via]

Yodel Course [Via]

A nickel is a nickel, a dime is a dime

It's that time again, where I try and make up for the lack of any real content this week by offering you a sop in the form of a song.

"Talkin' About You," by Piney "Kokomo" Brown and His Blue Flashes, might be one of my favorite songs ever. Recorded in the late '40s, it falls into the category of jump blues, a subspecies of blues that could be loosely defined as what rock and roll was before white people got their sanitizing hands on it. (See here for more info.)

Amazingly, Piney Brown (who is not the same Big Piney Brown memorialized in "Piney Brown Blues, or his brother Little Piney Brown) is still alive and touring.

I first heard jump blues eight years when I moved to NYC. It was around that time that I grew strangely (though not unjustifiably) disenchanted with modern music, and so I decided that I was a 40something nerdy white rock critic type stuck inside the body of a 22-year-old girl* and refused to listen to any recording artist who didn't possess at least two of the following qualities:

1)dead
2)incarcerated
3)crazy

I could pretty much find everything I needed at the late, great Wowsville Records, which, of course, was run by Italians. (Pop quiz: Why do Europeans care more about American roots music than we do? Because we're assholes, that's why.)

Now that Wowsville is gone, the best resource for all things old and scratchy (of every genre) is Roots and Rhythm, where you can also buy City Jump Vs. Country Jump, the truly, truly amazing comp on which "Talkin' About You" is the first track.

I'm no longer quite as despondent about the state of modern music, especially because now we have the Arctic Monkeys to save us all, but, frankly, there isn't anything out right now that can possibly stand up to this.

If you'll excuse me, I need to go re-alphabetize my record collection by sound engineer and take an inventory of my WFMU t-shirts.

Talkin' About You, by Piney "Kokomo" Brown and His Blue Flashes

*And lemme tell you, I cannot tell you how many 40something nerdy white rock critics types I met at that time who wouldn't have minded being stuck inside the body of this 22-year-old.

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky [Via]

Maud interviews Keith Gessen, the award-winning translator of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl

Best hed EVAR: "Butts' competitive juices ignite Dogs" [Via Reeves, who is embarrassed to say that it's his hometown paper]

This gets my vote for most depressing story of the day

Park Fast Stop Genocide

Sport: Equips a young man for society

Via the Daily Show, I just heard about this lovely, lovely gaffe great armflapping Christ, was this really a joke? she knew beforehand that he was going to do it? (I need to pay better attention) on the Nancy Grace Show from April 6, during a discussion of the Duke Lacrosse team rape investigation. After the jump, the transcript:

In this story about a woman and her helper monkey, we learn that monkeys love weathermen and Star Trek but hate Oprah

Message to all: IGNORE ME AT YOUR PERIL! [Thanks N]

something I learned today has the Gang of Four debut 7"

This month's Stay Free! magazine is devoted to one of my favorite topics, pranks, and features an interview with Leslie Savan on pop language: Companies pay big money to look like outsiders....Sprint execs are taking the fake rebel sell one step further—they’re telling us they know they’re ridiculous for claiming to stick it to the main, but are they cool or what for sticking it to the conventions of postmodern advertising?

Did Kurt Cobain die because he misread a poem? (Holy shit, poetry is even more dangerous than Suicide Solution!) [Via]

Vidiot confirms my fears about what panhandlers really want

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht

Holy crap. I had to look outside to see if a cloudburst of blood and toads was falling from the skies--the "editors" of Gawker actually admitted that maybe letting defrocked gossip columnist Jared Paul Stern take the reins for the weekend wasn't such a good idea.

Anyhow, as I've obliquely alluded to before, JPS and I share alma mater. (It's funny, re-reading that old post, it makes me wonder about something: Hypothetically, if Mercedes loaned you one of their new models for the weekend--out of the generous and altruistic spirit emblematic of the automotive industry, I'm sure, and not, say, for the purposes of getting a little love in your column--I wonder if they'd expect to get it back in one piece. Just asking.)

A lot of Gawker readers expressed shock and dismay at JPS's misogynist jabs at some models, but mostly they were appalled at the mediocrity of his writing. For those of us who remember reading his gossip column in the college paper--before the advent of editors--lemme assure you that these are his true, folksy cadences. On a couple occasions at school, some people accused him of plagiarism, but honestly: that style...it's quite inimitable. (Besides which, who would cop to being the real author anyhow? You'd have better luck getting Salinger out of hiding.)

JPS was dancing as fast as he could this weekend, trying to delete and edit the nastiest of the nasty comments, some of which implied that he was bisexual while in college. This is libel, plain and simple! Although there was a certain Secret History-meets-Metropolitan effeteness to his social circle, and although some people might have said that JPS didn't like girls very much (and I don't mean that in the Montgomery Clift way), he most definitely fucked them.

Anyhow, this weekend's experiment teaches us a couple things: 1) that unless you're Don Rickles, playing the Unabashed Asshole card has diminishing returns; 2) that Gawker has learned that not all publicity is good publicity and 3) that some people don't forget certain blind items in the college newspaper gossip column.

Funnily enough, this weekend the Times travel section features North Bennington in its "36 Hours in..." column. What a waste of ink. Frankly, the only two reasons I can think of to spend 36 hours in North B are if your postbac boyfriend got a QP of mushrooms or you're recuperating from a partial-birth abortion at the medical center.

On hunting wild ramps, the NYT has this to say: " nothing smelling like onion or garlic is poisonous," but they presumably are exluding the aftereffects of consumption

Vinyl Mine has posted a Bomp/Voxx comp that includes a track by the legendary Albany HC band Wolfpack, and a link to an interview with Wolfpack frontman Steve Reddy: Fighting, moshing, krsna, Porcell can't skate

Wrong Jon Stewart booked for speech at gala

Holy shit, this might win the award for stupidest Thursday Times Styles story YET

Head like a hole

Oddly enough, Maud and I were both at the dentist on Tuesday. As I've mentioned in the past, I like Dr. S very much, and I hope that she gets a personalized license plate for her new Mercedes-Benz SL that says DANAPD4THS.

The genesis of Tuesday's visit occurred a few months ago when I noticed this jagged spot on one of my molars after I had two fillings. I assumed that she'd used too much composite and created some kind of overhang. So I mentioned it to the hygienist during my routine cleaning last week. "Do you think Dr. S could grind it down a bit?" It seemed to be catching a lot of food, particularly red meat, a problem that, though small, is somewhat of an eating deterrent for me. It's a free country; why not demand unfettered access to red meat?

The Wrath of Grapes

Dana’s been after me to write about wine for awhile now. I’ve been sorta reluctant, honestly, mostly because I know enough about it to know that I know nothing about it, if you follow me. No? Lemme put it this way, then – if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I am a small, unauthorized nuclear device when it comes to wine and wine-related topics. Be that as it may, when we found out we’d won tickets to “Taste Washington”, the annual wine tasting event here in Seattle, I figured I’d give it a go. So, without any further ado, here it is:

Argentina On Two Steaks A Day: On dinner at midnight, steaks the size of beagles, and dulce de leche as cry for help [Via]

DNA testing and the "American Indian Princess Syndrome"

Odds and sods

There are all sorts of serious reviews of that are sitting in three-quarters- finished draft format right now, because I can't quiiiiiite finish them, and because there are these other lesser items, discussed below, littering the canyons of my mind. So, quickly:

I'm not quite sure what George Tabb is most famous for--I was familiar with him as a MaximumRocknRoll columnist, but he's also been in all sorts of bands of varying degrees of obscurity and fame. His new memoir, Surfing Armageddon: Fishnets, Fascists, and Body Fluids in Florida, details his teenage years, during which his insane, abusive father uprooted the family from their tony Connecticut enclave and moved them down to Florida. It's a bildungsroman involving sex, punk rock, personal identity crises, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Parts of Surfing Armageddon are entertaining, but overall it reminds me of that friend in school whose seemingly endless stories were hilarious but totally unbelievable.

Moving on:

Dresden Dolls, "Yes Virginia"

For any innovative young band who's achieved some success with their debut CD, the second album is an important milestone. Everywhere are critics, record labels, and fans ready to pounce on an effort that doesn't live up to a wide gamut of disparate expectations. Will it repeat the formula that made the debut successful ("You stopped innovating!") or will it head in new directions ("You're losing your core audience!"). Will it invite mainstream acceptance ("Sell out!") or will it turn up its nose the masses ("Whatever happened to...")? Or will it just, you know, suck?

Attention: Tomorrow night, Jim Hanas will be reading at NYPL. It's an early reading, too, which means you'll I'll get home in time to see the Gilmore Girls

The goddamned cheese lobby strikes again!

Why Won't God Heal Amputees? [Via]

Monkey depression is just like human depression

As the helpful source who sent along this delightful bagatelle put it, "This is like Christmas, your birthday, and winning the lottery all wrapped up into one, isn't it?"

Slides from a caveman PowerPoint presentation about "fire." [Via]

From the imaginatively paranoiac minds at AskMe: Why does my neighbor have so many guests?

Footage from the Boro Park riots: Because, y'know, Hitler's master plan also involved issuing a lot of traffic tickets

That Bocephus: What a charmer

Excellent critique of the Boro Park riots: Tickets? You're Upset Because of Tickets??

Shameless friend promotion department (but really, it's cool): jpo sends word of Guys With Feelings, a weekly podcast of all things LA, pop culture, sex, and (yuck) babies

Mixing Pop and Politics

I have never had much use for Kelefa Sanneh as a writer. Part of that stems from our differing tastes in music: he loves Top 40 pop, and I… don’t, really. That’s just an honest difference of opinion, though, and I can still respect someone who doesn’t see things my way. Occasionally I have to grit my teeth to do so, but I can usually pull it off.

Hey, didja know that the government has actually endorsed Quiznos (don't call them Quizno's) latest "orgy of meat"? No? [Via]

Stole a Pig and Away He Run

It's unusual that the last news you hear going to bed and the first news you read in the morning are both so delightful that you actually don't even care that you have a dental appointment.

This calls for a celebration. Drinks on the House!

Magnus Mills, "Explorers of the New Century"

It's really difficult to describe Magnus Mills' new book, Explorers of the New Century, without drawing comparisons to Ricky Gervais and Black Adder, as others have. Is it the food or the climate that breeds the UK's deadpan, dark humor?

Mills' latest work imagines the mundane, day-to-day existence of two teams of early-20th-century explorers who are competing to see who can cross a barren, unspecified landmass to reach the Agreed Furthest Point. Under the circumstances, this could have been potentially the most boring subject ever, but when I began Explorers, Mills' skillful, terse language and absurd, black humor took me completely off guard.

Carload of strangers drive into river, drowns [Thanks Tizzie!]

Bastards: City denies landmark application; Maspeth church from 1847 will likely be torn down to put up more ugly-ass apartments [More info here]

"Drawing Restraint 9," Matthew Barney

Before all you Matthew Barney acolytes start getting all huffy about any criticism of your own personal Jim Jones, lemme set a few things straight. Me, I kinda like him. First off, he's very handsome. (I think that more former models should become artists. Frankly, I'd like it if all artists--and this includes writers--were more attractive. I think there's a prejudice against good-looking artistes, and I want it to stop. Break through that glass ceiling, pretty folks! Don't be content with merely being more successful in all other aspects of life. Grab for that brass ring and maybe you can ride that pulchritude to the Biennale.)

Second: Vaseline + perineums? What's not to like?

My friend Kyeann has arrived in St. Petersburg, where despite the icy streets, the "Russian women somehow manage the sidewalks in some of the highest heels I’ve ever seen."