1. David Broder’s op-ed columns have always been worth at least one read. But somebody, please talk this dude outta agreeing to anymore reader Q&As if he’s gonna have nothing to say whatsoever about anything political. It’s rare that I’m able to call something out as a total waste of bandwidth, but damn. He should’ve just gone for a manicure or something. (No, seriously, don’t read it! I’m wasting still more bandwidth just by calling it out -- don’t perpetuate this vicious cycle of noncontent pretending to be content!)
2. As I’ve made clear elsewhere, I’ve no love for the new Wilco album, mostly because I haven’t been a Dad quite long enough. But the commercials Volkswagen chose to yolk the Sky Blue Sky cuts to are entertaining enough, continuing the automaker’s quirky advert winning streak – sublimely weird for a few years (da da da, etc.), then prettily weird (I’m thinking of the nu-Bug ones circa the late 1990s where they were licensing Stereolab and Spiritualized songs), then weird again but maybe not quite weird enough (How’d that VW get up in that tree? And why is all this happening in a Super Bowl ad?), then heart-attack jarring (“Things don’t ‘like’ happen,” cue sudden car crash) and today sorta weird but in a new and slightly thoughful way. Maybe I missed a few steps in the evolutionary chain, but if you’ve wasted enough time in front of a TV then you probably know what I mean. “Thoughtful” may be too generous for the entirety of the current ad crop, but I’m thinking mostly of the one where the dude steals a red VW and cruises around town just kind of enjoying the attention he’s attracting with the top down, eventually just returning it to where he got it (memo to runners who like to drive to public parks and leave your autos open with the keys “hidden” in the sun visors: you’re morons) instead of dropping it off at the friendly neighborhood 2 Fast 2 Furious chopshop. That particular spot gives the impression that the guy has been led to reconsider his line of work, but I prefer to think he’s simply decided to save up his ill-gotten gains for a VW of his own, or better yet, a VW dealership of his own, and in fact declined to steal this one for karmic purposes. Or something. Maybe he just breaks into VWs then drives ‘em around town for kicks or because he can’t afford one? Either way, I’m just saying. These ads have had the interesting effect of (a) making me miss driving a VW even more than I already do and (b) giving me a great deal of respect the hipster moxie of whoever’s pimping VW these days, while (c) not making me want to listen to Wilco at all.
3. This is pretty funny, in a space-as-final-frontier way.
4. Longtime World's Strongest Man fandom + tight reporting yields great alt-weekly story.
5. So I’ve been enjoying this new 3xCD noise box set a lot, but I don’t understand why the fuck noise dudes need secret code names when this is the first most folks are hearing of their projects (are you Thurston Moore? John Olson, Leslie Keffer, Carly Ptak, Pete Swanson, Mark Morgan? Then yes, go ahead with code names to build mystique or what have you). I don’t even care what your real names are, folks! The question is more, can you bring the goods? Can you scare me? Can you scare people who can hear the sheet-metal screech bleeding from my headphones? All you need in the liners for these things are, like, (a) your group name, (b) an email address, and (c) the song title itself, and (d) a website (or a myspace page, which is turning into a must for this scene - which is weird because all of these people are anti-authoritarian art/eff the system/eff dictators/eff-Bush/eff-something types and yet they’re promoting themselves via Rupert Murdoch, which doesn’t seem subversive or whatever so much as it seems lazy). Throw in your actual names if you like! But don’t call yourself Bruce78888 or something stupid. Why does each member of your no-wave grind trio need code names? You;re not a wannabe Diplomats or Wu-Tang Clan; you won’t be referring to yourselves in the music itself, and for all anyone knows one person’s doing the drones/tapes/banshee screams. This isn’t Final Fantasy gaming or a chat room; no-one thinks you’re funny for going by a name you came up with in 10 seconds, and the person formatting and laying out the box info, probably for free, doesn’t need the added hassle just because you’re an idiot.
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