Homesick

This Jay Pinkerton man, he speaks the truth. The American healthcare system is utterly rubbish, except for wealthy Texans with heart conditions. The Canoodian system, the French system, the Japanese system, they are all better. Maybe even the Limey one. Run for the hills. In fact healthcare and capital punishment are the two great means by which Ameria-haters draw attention to the country's barbarism. Looking down your nose at countries with GDPs less than IBM and political institutions that belong in the 16th century? Um, OK, but shouldn't you be aiming a bit higher?

Although I must add that you have Restless Leg Syndrome licked.

Ass Was The Year That Was

What do you do when the gap between Christmas and New Year when the abundance of food turns your brain into goo, and the presence of relatives turns you, once again, into the imbecile you once were? That's right, children, lists and awards. Here's our list-tastic list of lists of award winners.

Stacy Sutton Award For Screaming So Irritating You Wish That the Badlets Would Bring Sweet Release Right Now - Dakota Fanning, War Of The Worlds. In her defence, we've seen a bunch of Slopelets behave just as badly.

Ten reasons to lay off the blogs:

1. Fitzmas
2. Butterstick
3. Gilliard hearts the TWU
4. 90% Of Gothamist
5. Clublife going avant-garde
6. The Next Hurrah - not enough hours in the day
7. Safari's RSS - like most RSS, not that time-saving if you're obsessive
8. Digitising vinyl is the new refreshing web pages repeatedly while waiting for indictments
9. Banana Nutrament's no-wave obsession
10.Maybe this blog would be less like porridge - lumpy and lukewarm

Five Fifth Ave restaurants that must die:

1. Moutarde
2. 200 Fifth
3. Convivium. Too rude, and you have to remember, I'm english.
4. Mekong
5. Lobo P. slope

Five Fifth Ave restaurants that must live:

1. Melt
2. Tempo
3. Bogota Bistro
4. Stone Park Cafe
5. Belleville (providing it goes back to the old menu)

Five sorely missed Slope places

1. St Mark's Bistro
2. Biscuit
3. That empty lot that's now a Commerce Bank
4. The empty Underberg building. Eulogised by Lethem, now to be demolished
5. City Lighting. Not that I hate the Burrito place that's now there, but I really liked the bar.

Gig I'm Most Cross To Have Missed - The final Rocket From The Crypt show

Gumby Fresh SO IS a rock pig:

1. Gringcorp ate all the meat
2. Fine wines and industrial go so fine together
3. Brooklyn's stoners get served
4. Twin Keyspan Park Attack!
5. CBGBs produces best line-up in years. We still mock it
6. Sufjan won all the awards. We drank downstairs
7. Gringcorp flees key wielding Guido cokeheads
8. We scope the Preznit's bald spot
9. Gringcorp flirts with deportation
10. The War On Marty. We will never be defeated. Even when we are

Coming up in 2006 - the first person singular. I'm sick of being in the same gang as Gawker.

Happy New Year. The present is the only good Oasis song. Not only is it not dead, it has the best chorus ever:

Oasis - "Acquiesce"
Here you can buy "The Masterplan", a relic of a more civilised age

Eastern Promises

Been a while, that's for sure, and when people with roughly equivalent tech savvy to me can put together megamixes while cooped up with relatives, I really should be hanging my head in shame. Being a short-lived flickr celebrity probably went to my head a moment there.

So what was the story of the last few weeks? Saturnalia in Newburyport, MA, a town that time forgot until mass transit rediscovered it. Very nice it was too. Got to listen to the warm, fuzzy Congregationals singing Christmas carols to the wrong tunes. And saw the movie version of the musical of the Mel Brooks film The Producers - in Boston. Which was like the perfectly acceptable original version only with added show tunes. Bobbins it was.

But Syriana, caught at BAM the other night, was splendid. Some of the more dimwitted of my professional acquaintances were wont to call The World Is Not Enough, hardly 007's finest outing, the last word in international infrastructure intrigue. They, however, would naturally prefer their dark arts to be so trivialised.

Syriana is a sharp, well-paced, mostly thoughtful look at how finance and politics intersect. It does have a touch of the Tom Clancy about it, a probably unavoidable slant given the creators' need to make the film fast-paced and relevant to the American public. Moreover, it is hard to think of an Emirate as a suitable candidate for the fictional despotism featured in the film – except for Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, the screenwriters were apt to switch between LNG and crude oil as interchangeable commodities, even though the market dynamics behind their trade are hugely different. The reality of securing these energy supplies is not down to the interplay of politics so much as how these conspire to produce very cheap loans to the countries in question. And these loans do make a difference.

China, despite what the film suggests, is not quite in the Middle East game yet, although it is very close to being a player, and is presently behaving much as its fictional emissaries are in Indonesia.

Still, the mysterious “financial advisers”? All present and correct, although much more likely to be ensconced at a large US or European investment bank than a Geneva-based derivatives house, as Mr. Damon is. The shady US lawyers/lobbyists also exist, although it would be difficult for them to gain such an obvious pecuniary stake in an oil venture. Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, a book I've been threatening to read for some time, would probably serve as an interesting companion piece.

And what happens when an LNG tanker gets hit by explosives? NO ONE KNOWS. Some say a nuclear explosion type thing, some say, a feeble farting sound. Me, I think that someone with $200 million and absolutely no marbles needs to find out. That way, we'll avoid any more pitiful Syriana-esque cop outs.

What will happen tomorrow night, no-one can tell. I may rock Cobble Hill, but then again I may stay in a while and watch my DVDs of the first season of the A-Team, the one with the pilot featuring the IMPOSTOR FACE.

Finally, the moderately creepy-looking Vincent Schiavelli is no more. His NYT obit is nowhere near extensive enough, but he will live on in our nightmares. RIP.

Gluecifer - "Bossheaded"
Buy the Sleazy Listening comp here, or the Soaring With Eagles at Night (To Rise With Pigs In The Morning) album here. Actually, do both. Gluecifer just split up, and Norwegian skag costs money.

Rhapsody In Orange

This Is Why We Roll
Originally uploaded by Gringcorp.

Suggestions for suitable cross bridge listening have ranged from "All Along The Watchtower" (very apt, Jehovah's Witnesses fans), to Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. We could have added "If You Need Oil", by Randy Newman, but the iPod also crapped this evening.

But we digress. This is the reason we live in New York, and you're welcome to share in it.

The Wages Of..

Sluggish Neon Snakes
Originally uploaded by Gringcorp.

The last time we tried taking pictures of skylines at night was in Hong Kong, and the results were a tad underwhelming. We'd forgotten the experience, since the only way we can handle the SAR is by getting very drunk.

But hot damn were we looking foward to taking a picture of the Manhattan skyline at night, oblivious to the fact that our Canon A70, while fine, was not going to be good for a long exposure night shot without a tripod.

Of course, we know this now, and did as best we could with the Manhattan Bridge as a support, but the results weren't those we dreamt about all day. Still, could have been worse - the batteries crapped out as soon as we got in range. A short trip BACK DOWN the bridge to a Chinatown Duane Reade for batteries, and we were back in business.

A quick note to drivers. You probably thought you were part of the plucky-New-Yorkers-Make-Do-In-The-Strike narrative. You weren't. You behaved appallingly, almost all of you.

a litany of blocked crosswalks, red lights run, and junctions gridlocked, your lack of consideration for the more numerous than normal pedestrians exceeded your lack of consideration for each other. But only just.

We probably should be hanging in there with you, and admiring your spirit, and no doubt some of you are good people. But mostly we're pretty happy - if a tad sore - at racing over the bridge in front of you.

The end of the transit strike is to be welcomed in part since we already have the above picture, and in part because tomorrow there will half as many of you around.

Settlement Fashioned From Purest Evil

Hova Kraft
Originally uploaded by Gringcorp.

So, looks like we got an end to the strike, and at a stroke the rationale for posting endless poorly composed happy snaps of Flatbush Avenue and the Manhattan Bridge environs collapses. Which is not to say that we won''t be walking back over tonight, to get a super bad-ass picture of the skyline, just that there's no sense of immediacy any more.

Right up till the end both the NY Times and NY1, the only news outlets that we trust for the city, were both insisting that the TWU Local 100 was on its knees and riven by defections (the MTA's adverts spoke of hundreds out of a workforce of, we think it is, 36,000). We're sceptical, although it is true that darkest Queens and Brooklyn were worst hit, more blue collar, and pretty p*ssed off.

The agreemment, far as we can tell, leaves honour intact for both sides. It wasn't the climactic battle that some were hoping for, but it has focused the attention of the city on how angry the transit workers are.

Steve Gilliard was apt to go Diego Rivera all over the transit workers, all noble countenances and unsung heroes, but managed to grasp the racial undertones of the dispute rather earlier than most, although given his proclivity for fiinding such overtones, he was bound to tell the right time at least once. Moreover, he reminded us that guys that man the token booths aren't the only transit workers we should think about.

Still, maybe the track workers could aks the booth operators to be a mite less arsey in future, thus clearing up probably the most formidable propaganda obstace the transit workers need to overcome.

Anyway, we got business at J&R, the walk is still definitely on. No point in posting all the other pictures, but click on the one above, and you can see them at Flickr if you are so interested. Flickr's been a bit of a discovery, too, in terms of the community attached. The hosting's good, but we've had more views for the pictures we've posted there in two days than the blog gets in a week.

Blogging The Telecommute

So, Day Two of the great New York City Transit Strike and we're tired already. We'd have liked to have posted last night, but were too dog tired from the walk back to say anything. Moreover, we wanted to take a picture of the Manhattan skyline at night - one of our favourite views - ringed by stalled traffic, but the batteries on the old camera had given up.

Still, what was a pretty invigorating yesterday, at least when paired with an industrial-size hangover, is now a dull ache in the legs. 9.5 miles we walked yesterday, with a side order of alcohol-induced cramp in the legs. Nice! Still, the 80-odd minutes it took back was much less than the poor sods in buses on the Manhattan Bridge. Plus, no Marty or New York Times reporters!

Plenty of people writing about the strike this morning, so there's not much more to add. Well there could be, if, as many of the people scooped up by Technorati do, we were to rely on the Wall Street Journal and Fox News for coverage. Then, you'd almost feel the forth and spittle coming off the page.

For what it's worth, we're still finding it hard to hate the TWU local 100, even if the strike forces us to shop in the vile Ratner mall at the end of the road rather than the mighty J&R. Right or wrong, the union's going on strike in part because of how badly they've been treated the last few years. The money's OK, but labour relations down below have rarely been pleasant. Could be the pensions, could be the training, but most of them have just had enough.

Quick update on the graffiti at DeKalb we caught yesterday. In a pleasing bit of symmetry, as we were walking back through downtown Brooklyn, some kind of motley band of blackleg labour was taking it down very slowly. Who they were, and whether they were paid using twenties doled out by Big Transit, we cannot tell. But we are pleased to have the moment for perpetuity. Got quite a few Boingboing-induced hits on our flickr page, as well.

In other news, we have a new Republican hero to replace creaking hack John McCain. Judge Jones, who is in fact a real one rather then those ones who crop up on UPN at 10am, has shot down this intelligent design business ("why do we exist? Who can tell? Maybe the aliens they seeded our brains with THE CODE") rather decisively. He also included a pleasingly gratuitous dig at the nonsense's proponents:

"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the true purpose behind the ID Policy."

Class, not quite profile picture calibre, even if it did not involve displeasing the mighty Zod. But good nonetheless. You shall have some space until we post again.

[UPDATE: Hey, 'landgrab types. I would like to point out that I did not ultimately visit said Circuit City. I decided to walk to work in Union Square, tried the Circuit City there, and finally settled on a less crowded PC Richards. You can see some of the pictures above. Not that I wouldn't visit the stupid mall if Armageddon came.]

Spot The Gecko

Classic Manhattan
Originally uploaded by Gringcorp.

The view of Manhattan we all know and love. Some where on that bridge, Marty Markowitz might be posing for a picture. As you can see, the conditions for a walk are pretty good.

Jehovah's Ladder

Jehovah's Ladder
Originally uploaded by Gringcorp.

This somewhat gritty shot is of two of the huge buildings that the Jehovah's Witnesses' world headquarters occupy in downtown Brooklyn. Word is that there is a network of secret tunnels underneath them all to match the skyways that you can see.

Oddly enough, some Witnesses rang the doorbell the other day. Since we couldn't hear what they were saying over the intercom, we came down to check the mumbling out. When we came downstairs and spied the bible we said "awfully sorry, nothing to see here, I'm an atheist. toodle-pip". Think it worked.

Revolution!

DeKalb Avenue Graffiti
Originally uploaded by Gringcorp.

It would have been nice to see some official pickets or something, but not a sausage, despite (or perhaps because of) being about a block away from MTA headquarters. Junior's is nearby, but we haave more important things than cheescake on our minds.

Intemperate union member watch. Yesterday on the TV we heard this: "Roger Toussaint's got his finger on the trigger, and he's gonna pull it." Nice, specially with a gun control bill up at Albany and all that.

The Blogging Of The Commute

Well, they do say that bloggers are self absorbed little scumclowns, so here goes it. After a night's mindless drinking we woke up to Cutesome cussing out the labour breakdown. Feh, thought we, this will be a good day to stay in bed. But NY1 became so boring, we thought we might as well go to work.

Only 70 minutes it took us, too. We walked quickly, taking care to avoid the attack dogs and roving Markowitzes. Zoomed over the Manhattan Bridge in no time, and even managed to take a few pictures, which we will post in a little bit. Very smug, we're feeling this morning, except for the bit where we walked past the same place we'd been drinking last night. Made us comprehend the futility of modern existence and all that.

Stuck Mojo

OK, b*tches, time to walk to work. We stand with the BROTHERS (we're using UK seventies industrial relations slang here, by the way) in the union against the clowns led by the real estate developer. Plus, we always wondered how long it took.

City state, indeed...

Mclusky - "Mi-O-Mai"
Buy "My Pain & Sadness Is More Sad & Painful Than Yours " here, you public transsport-shagging scumclowns

We Are All Aliens Now

Now, of course such sentiments have usually followed acts of unspeakable violence (human or natural), and their concomitant devastation. Such sentiments are usually empty and trite, rather like those right-wing bloggers taking a break from dentistry jokes to post Union Jacks on the corner of their sites. But they do convey one useful idea - that the unspeakable and the unthinkable just became neither.

Which is why, and we won't try and hide it, we're experiencing a hint of schadenfreude at the news that the President has authorised spying on his own people. Could be the guy reading some Mao, could be your basic ranting anti-war type. Doesn't matter. The president is so scared of terrorism, and you (were) are so terrified too, you might just let him.

Here's the thing, though. Yours truly has already become quite used to the arbitrary and capricious actions of the US government. And that's without being tied up and beaten in Bagram Airbase. National security has already justified inconveniences and rudeness being showered on its foreigners. We're utterly aware of the fact that we have very few protections under US law, and need to be squeaky clean if we're going to stay out of its maw.

And America had in place this constitution to protect it from the limeys, and then it found it was being disregarded after first being thrown aside for dealing with the limeys (and indeed others of far less pink complexion). Anyway, there are plenty of people more shrill than we are to explain the implications.

But you get a very good idea of a government's character from the way its treats its visitors. Midnight Express or no:

Sonny Vincent - "Madras Prison"
Buy some Swami sh*t here, cos that's where we nicked the rekkid

The Air War For The Underground

Damn it's great to be blogging from bed again, coffee in one hand, shuffling the iPod like billy-o. Truth be told, and we know it's only 9.45 am, and we've spent 80% of the time since we got in sleeping, but we're feeling pretty acclimatised. What time we didn't spend quiching/sleeping, we spent in Blue Ribbon, swilling Spanish wine, and treating the appetiser menu like tapas.

But there was time for a quick gawk at NY1, which has come up with a suitably doom-laden sting to attach to its transit strike coverage. NY1 is obviously also the channel to pick when you want to run badly-produced pro-labour adverts.

Thus we sat through TWU 100's effort, which consisted of jumping between three talking aheads against a rather unfetching beige backdrop. The three were middle-aged, African American ladies explaining that their position was really rather reasonable, and could they please have a contract? (To digress, briefly, can we note that NY labour negotiations are always premised in such a way that a contract is always presented as something that it is in the power of employers to give, rather than the product of bilateral negotiations?).

Anyway, the advert, while amateurish, at least succeeded in giving you a hint of the essential decency of transit workers, an impression that is highly necessary, given that many New Yorkers have an impression of MTA workers as barely civilised jobsworths, if not a band that includes quite a few out-and-out sociopaths. Not that we bear them any ill will, that's what public workers in NY do.

Anyway, NY1 is seriously flooding the zone with its subway coverage, so it was only time before its search for nutbars lurking within the fine body of transit workers bore fruit. It managed to grab a vox pop from a somewhat overweight, ginger, and belligerent bus driver in (we're guessing) Queens, which ran just after the aforementioned cuddly ad break. In it, and we paraphrase only slightly we got this: "Jesus, I can't believe that we decided at the last minute not to strike. Now everyone will think that we're pussies." Bring on Tuesday, kids.

Anyway, bugger the topical posts, it's time for some found audio, digitised from the impressively rare record collection Daddy Gringcorp. Since the rest of our digitisations date from a small window of 1992-1996, we hope you will enjoy this scratchy, poppy recording from 1958 by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. They harmonise quite delightfully together, as you can hear from a Folkways recording that was rereleased in 1992.

Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry - "Better Day"
Buy "Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry Sing" here. Their families are likely poorer than RL Burnside's ever will be

We've picked up a willingness to rifle through old blues music from Gringcorpdad, well him and Jon Spencer (rather than, um, John Spencer, RIP). Yet, we had no idea till yesterday that Eric Clapton, who's made more money of black music than any white man since Elvis, once gave this hideously racist speech saying that England would become a "black colony". The man clearly had a better idea of what he was doing than David "I was so f***ed up I had no idea I was giving the old seig heil" Bowie.

In fact, we have a former acquaintance that was much more disturbed by him making so much money off that song he wrote about his deceased son. To be frank, we find that a bit less disturbing, maybe even understandable. Hopefully Alexis Korner would approve.

Wind-Up City

There's something deliriously apt about the fact that our best stab at connectivity comes in the form of T-Mobile's hotspot in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport. The morning's news was strange - the President had been told by the Senate that it did not trust him to run the War On Terror. We've spent a (probably healthy) period away from the blogs, except for a brief moment yesterday, when they all seemed to be rather absorbed in something Dan Froomkin wrote. Who is Dan Froomkin? Exactly.

But this Patriot defeat is peculiar. You might call it a sign that we've become more relaxed about the threat since 9-11. But the blogs left have been reasonably sober about the defeat. Given that there has been almost no effort to call the dissenters Traitors and Cowards, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the leader of the free world is now considered no more fit to launch the might of the world's last superpower at its internal enemies than he is to run a whelk stall. The business with the clandestine surveillance probably didn't help.

The preceding paragraphs may have made sense, or they may not. We're running on four hours right now, on the back of a night out rocking the mighty Royal Oak. The Harveys Best was more than tolerable, and the pies were magnificent. But we're about ready to quiche right now.

A day ago we'd have ended this post by saying that tonight we rock Michigan Avenue. But tis not to be. In this situation, then, we could post this, but the lyrics aren't very apt at all, even if the title is. So we'll chuck on some Underworld. Not very rare or anything, but very good right here.

Underworld - "Dark & Long (Dark Train)"
Purchase "1992-2002" here. Or Dubnobasswithmyheadman. To be honest we're beyond caring right now

Sick Transit Gloria

Hey kids, been a while and sorry for the extremely poor state of posting recently - a combination of poor privacy, poor time management, and poor connectivity. Yesterday, for instance, was spent hunting around the region surrounding the Gare St Lazare in Paris looking for a French laptop cable. Scunthorpe was, well, dial-up, and we had channeled much of our energy into digitising some rare 60s blues albums.

We'll be back in the new country in a couple of days, at which point we'll be a mite less frazzled, and a mite more engaged. Again, our apologies. In the mean time, we would like to wish the dwindling NY readership the best of luck in dealing with the transit strike, should it transpire. Current omens are not good.

Still, if there may be something that can knock some sense into the combined heads of Mayor Mike and the Transit Workers' Union. We're not even going to pick sides. But can we please recognise that in the event of a strike, many workers from Brooklyn may be walking to and from work on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And we all know what that means. Top bumptious f*** and America's most redundant politician Marty Markowitz will be at the other end to get his name in the paperswelcome you back. Don't say you weren't warned. If there was one thing that the great blackout of 2003 taught us, it was to take the Manhattan Bridge in these instances.

Good luck, kids. We'll be drinking in Islo.


Marty woz here

Mellon And On

Greetings from dank London town, and lord love the Starbucks. Yes, lord love the Starbucks, where a call for black coffee is not met with a hopelessly bitter Americano. McDonalds is also meant to be good for the homesick, according to Cutesome, who is if anything fonder of the place than we are. Moreover, DayjobLondonCentral has now begun to offer a fine selection of ground coffees, yours for the price of having the courage to clean out the French Press/Cafetiere.

In this short interval between the office clearing out and our moving to join them, we woould like a to share a couple of things with you.

Felix Salmon's latest on the Google Book Search controversy, which covers, to simplify, the right of google to scan and make searchable books without the permission of their authors. Felix points out that if intellectual property such as books are to be considered as such, then there's a pretty lousy market in it. We're still not sure whether he thinks that this is a good thing, but he seems on fairly solid ground in saying that the current system, which relies on the interplay between corporations and their prized auteurs, is a tad unfair to the auteur's collaborators.

The extension of this argument may well be that authors should be able to do with their works what David Bowie has done with his royalty payments, and borrow a huge amount of money against future revenues. Stephen King, Michael Crichton, and the loathsome Dan Brown would all benefit, should they ever need an island in a hurry. Oh, bugger, this was dealt with in the comments. Foor what it's worth, the sale of copyright, as opposed to the rights to income streams, should be possible, much as it is in music. The terms under which you sell it, however, are the kicker. Just ask Suge Knight's clients. Heh.

The bipolar gentleman who was shot yesterday is one of those horrific moments when we realise that the unflinching unimaginitive devotion to the rules among US law enforcemment has reached its nadir. Yes, it is daft to take a meds-less manic depressive on a plane. But police are called to deal with rampaging crazies the whole time, and have learned to deal with them with discretion, albeit with mixed results. Aviation security no longer allows for this, and we'll probably cheer them on when they do it.

More! Exile!

A mere couple of days after the Chile expedition, it's time to head back to London to exchange poorly-chosen gifts and make nice in dayjobHQland. The intervening period has not been one of extended creativity, and this shows both on the infrequency of the posts and the Sitemeter.

Well, not much is going to change, at least until it's possible to get a couple of gentle quiet moments. Maybe some more St Bride's pictures, a half decent meal, the end of humanity as we know it. Have some fun, anyway, and we'll be back in a day or two.

The Rolling Stones - "Turd On The Run"
Buy Exile... simple as that

Lunacide On Ice

It's also the time of the month when you are pointed the direction of Sugarzine to which Gringcorp is still contributing columns. This last was transmitted to the editrix from the LAN Chile VIP lounge in JFK's terminal 4. The wireless was only so-so, albeit much better than in any of the hotels we have visited in the last year. More importantly, we were dog-tired and a mite tipsy, and so the whole confection comes across as even more old-fashioned and camp than normal. It also borrows liberally from the post on the Stuckists we wrote last year.

We probably protested too much when we implied that the whole thing was a tissue of lies. if anything, we were a little too honest as to the limitations of our research, and would probably make a miserable living as a freelance music writer. For the record, though, most of it is true, and Billy Childish IS a living god. Quick moment of snark towards the hand that doesn't feed us, though - what sort of "new york city culture magazine" draws its writers from as far away as Honolulu, Oakland, and Brooklyn? Maybe they will be coming back here soon to become HUSTLERS.

Superman, He Found It In The Coal

So, congratulations to Evil E, (not, it must be stressed, mucker of Ice-T, and all-round pimp behind the wheel Evil E, but a civilian whose name has been changed to make him more dangerous) on getting affianced. This would not, as at least one celebrity blogger has suggested, an occasion for posting barbed Kanye videage.

Nope, we got some Sugar for you. It's rather appropriate, and one of the first Sugar songs on which David Barbe sings. Like a girl. We have it as the B-side to "If I Can't Change Your Mind", but you can find it on Sugar's B-sides compilation as well.

Sugar - "Where Diamonds Are Haloes"
Buy "Besides" here, working on the assumption you're not hardcore enough to buy the single

Would a mere one song posting be enough to celebrate this event? We think not. So we shall also pose a slightly barbed inquiry as to the date of the big day. It is from Chapel Hill's equally high-pitched popsters Superchunk, and was bought in the same sh*tey Cambridge vinyl emporium where we scored the wibbling Sebadoh. Not up there with "Precision Auto", or "New Low", but the chordage, it is good.

Sebadoh - "The Question Is How Fast"
Get your "On The Mouth" here

Finally the Forgotten NY Roughneck Cru hame come up with the Gowanus internet tour we have threatened since monkeys ruled the earth.