The Lumberjack Thief has never been much of a creative costumer on Halloween — though one year I did dress up as a Lumberjack Prince.

But my good friend, Mr. Paul Villanova (a true Lupin if there ever was one), has provided me with inspiration for next year. 10/31/08 here I come:

And for you indie kids out there, where ever you may be, spot the Roky:

Ministry - Every Day Is Halloween (buy)

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If you’ve found yourself here, it probably means you’re either a music scavenger seeking the “new to you” or you’re just someone I know. For both personality types, I have something special to offer today:

My Elite Advice

It’s quite simple. If you like quality tune-age, you should be checking out both Funky16Corners and Iron Leg on a regular basis.

Overseen by the same deeply knowledgeable proprietor, on any given day you’re bound to be hit with a sweet cut you’ve never heard or blown away by a keen variation on a track you’ve always loved. Either way, the Funky Iron Legs is a win-win deal.

Rubber Souled, 2, 3

The Family Tree - Slippin’ Thru My Fingers (Iron Leg’s Info)

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The Lumberjack Thief makes a cameo appearance in this comic. Can you spot him?

More comics here.

The Synchrotron Mishap - Synchrotron Mishap (info)

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A prominent byline in the nexus between DC’s young liberal and young libertarian wunderkinds, Julian Sanchez is the man who netted one of the blogosphere’s earliest “scalps” by revealing John Lott-booster Mary Rosh to be John Lott himself.

Sanchez, who is a contributing editor for Reason and a former staff writer at the Cato Institute, is currently gracing the cover of The American Prospect with an article about how comic books have responded to the War on Terror and the Iraq War.

1) What is the first website (other than your own or email) that you visit in the morning? Either my RSS feed or Shoutingmat.Ch (a blog aggregator), though sometimes I’ll just skip to a friend’s blog.

2) What is the most interesting bit of information that you’ve picked up in the past month? America now has more World of Warcraft players than farmers. Also, apparently among graphic designers, your attitude toward the Helvetica font (attitudes which seem to run quite intense in both directions) is some sort of hugely significant shibboleth.

3) How would you describe your taste/interest in music? My current listening probably breaks down something like: 65% standard 20-something Indie rock, 20% 20th century classical/art music, 5% classical-classical music, 5% Jazz, 5% opera.

4) Name five of your favorite songs at the moment (in no particular order).

1) Nina Simone – “Feelin’ Good”
2) Beirut – “Scenic World” (the EP version with the full band, not the weak Casiotone-sounding one from Gulag Orkestar)
3) Steve Reich – “Different Trains”
4) My Bloody Valentine – “Only Shallow”
5) Georgie James - “Cake Parade”

Honorable mentions for being stuck in my head harder than Trotsky’s icepick lately: Freedy Johnston’s “Bad Reputation” & Battles’ “Leyendecker”

5) Name five of your favorite albums of all time (in no particular order).

1) The Solti/Berlin Philharmonic recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (granting that it’s probably cheating to call four operas an “album”…)
2) Built to Spill – Keep it Like a Secret (yes, yes, I know the Objectively Correct choice from them is Perfect from Now On, but I can sing along to KILaS)
3) The Magnetic Fields – 69 Love Songs
4) Dismemberment Plan – Emergency & I
5) Mike Doughty – Skittish (not nearly as musically interesting as his Soul Coughing stuff, but every single track is completely infectious)

6) What are some songs to which you have a particular emotional attachment? Weirdly, “Barbie Girl” is the strongest one. An old college friend used to belt it at the top of his lungs as we drove to debate tournaments. He went off to law school and dropped dead at 23 of a rare brain tumor, and I can’t hear it without tearing up now, absurd as that might sound.

Other, less dramatic ones: Dismemberment Plan’s “The City,” which I was listening to a lot around the time I left New York for DC. Philip Glass’ “Metamorphosis,” just for being pretty. Beauty Pill’s “Cigarette Girl from the Future” works pretty well as a mid-20s-existential-crisis soundtrack. Tori Amos’ “Little Earthquakes,” Galaxie 500’s “Blue Thunder,” Postal Service’s “District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” and The Decemberists’ “Red Right Ankle” all have girl-specific associations. And Nine Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have” never fails to make me feel 13 again.

7) How did you first get interested in music and how has your taste developed since then? My father’s a huge opera geek, so I sometimes say I was raised Wagnerian in lieu of any more traditional religious upbringing. The first rock band I remember being really into was They Might Be Giants; someone exposed me to them at summer camp, and I ran out and got Flood as soon as I got back home. I was listening to a lot of industrial stuff around age 13, because at 13 you’re required to be vaguely angry whether or not you have any particular reason to be, and then pulled a complete 180 in high school and started listening to all the jam bands my hippie friends were into. In college, between Napster, Amazon’s “people who liked X may also like Y,” and a girlfriend who was much hipper than I was, I got more into indie rock. The jazz side mostly comes from a friend in New York who was studying jazz drumming at the New School at the time.

8) What are some of your musical guilty pleasures? I will, after a few drinks, confess to having attended something like 30 Phish shows; I’ll occasionally toss on one of their live cuts.

9) If you were running for President in 2008, what song would you use as your campaign theme? Is it too cutesy to say “Electioneering?” Probably. Maybe “Gouge Away,” provided I can claim it’s about cutting the budget.

10) What is your opinion on downloading copyrighted material without paying for it? A qualified thumbs up. Obviously, artists need to get paid. So the key question always has to be: “Would this download have been a sale in a world of perfect copyright enforcement?” If the answer is no, then it’s a source of mild enjoyment or information for the downloader and a wash from the artist’s perspective, which makes the download a Pareto improvement, as the wonks say. If you listen to it and conclude that you would buy a track or album if you couldn’t download it, though, then I do think you’re obligated to buy it at some point; otherwise you’re just making other people subsidize the production of your entertainment.

One big benefit of downloading, incidentally, is that whereas the development of people’s musical taste used to be far more significantly constrained by their immediate social milieu or what was getting radio play, downloading makes it easy to listen broadly, experiment, and take chances on artists and whole genres that most people would never gamble ten bucks on, because (of course) they’re not into it yet.

Here are some tunes for Julian that the government won’t compel you to listen to, but which you should freely choose to hear.

1) Quasi - Hot Shit (buy)
2) Slapp Happy - Casablanca Moon (buy)
3) The Mattoid - Tinkli Vinkli (buy)
4) Drag City Supersession - Zero Degrees (buy)
5) Brian Eno And Robert Fripp - Evensong (buy)
6) The Young Fresh Fellows - Gus Theme (buy)
7) Half Japanese - Firecracker (buy)
8) Royal Trux - The Exception (buy)
9) Johnny Dowd - Ballad Of Lonnie Wolf (buy)
10) Donovan - Clara Clairvoyant (buy)
11) Mark Eric - Night Of The Lions (Hat Tip)
12) Black Grape - Kelly’s Heroes (buy)
13) White Denim - ShakeShakeShake (info)
14) Shuggie Otis - Not Available (buy)
15) Frank Zappa And Burt Ward - Teenage Bill Of Rights (info)
16) Scene Creamers - Bag Inc. (buy)
17) Mercurry Rev - The Happy End (The Drunk Room) (buy)
18) Laurie Anderson - Let X Equal X (buy)
19) The Late B.P. Helium - Belief System Derailment Scenario (buy)
20) Os Mutantes - Cantor De Mambo (buy)
21) John Lennon - Serve Yourself (Home Recording) (buy)

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For Halloween this year, I want to be somebody who asks the right questions:

There’s an analogy here somewhere:

Circulatory System - The Lovely Universe (buy)

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If there’s one thing Pop Up Video taught me, it’s that nepotism was different back in the 80s. Today, it can only make you editor of your batshit crazy father’s old magazine, but back then, it could get Michael Jackson to sing back up on your single:

Rockwell, you see, is the son of Motown honcho Barry Gordy. And his sister, Hazel, is married to Michael’s brother Jermaine, thus the friendly collaboration. No hating though. We don’t do that here if the song is decent, and Somebody’s Watching Me is, in that exemplary of it’s decade kind of way.

Michael Jackson - Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough (Original Demo Recording) (buy)

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The Lumberjack Thief, mysterious as he may be, has sources all over the world feeding him information, allowing him to spout off in a haughty Marty Peretz-ian manner about whatever he damn well pleases. Just like Marty, I don’t need to actually know what I’m talking about, I just need to sound like I do.

For instance, my man in China — David Stearns — informs me of what I can only assume are the most common English names used by all Chinese children:

Senson, Winson, Wyman, Jeckool, Cherry, Neo, Solo, Armstrong, Tree, Binary, King, Kobejordan, Lip and Flash [sic to all]. I’ve also met Key, Lockra, and Ice through the English Lounge and English Corner; and other teachers have related two more winning students’ names: Cabbage and Challenge.

Beyond his efforts in introducing redheaded children into the Chinese population, Stearnsy is also an amateur Scientology enthusiast, which can be challenging as he bruises easily, and they don’t much like non-professional enthusiasts. Evidence:

L. Ron Hubbard - Funeral For A Planet (Yes, the Scientology dude)

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When you live your life like a Lumberjack such as I, you’re often forced to chose between different slices of the wilderness. I find myself with one such choice moment tomorrow evening. Should I go see New York Times columnist Paul Krugman discuss his liberalism at the Center for American Progress or should I witness Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs bring the bottom of the bottle rock to DC9?

Let’s weigh the options.

Krugman is smart and might make me smarter, but might also make me snooze. This is how he sounded the last time he spoke at the Center, as I call it:

Now, Ms. Golightly. She used to hang with Billy Childish, who has a mustache that a Lumberjack can respect. She sings pretty too:

Holly Golightly - You Have Yet To Win (buy)

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The context for this Zombie protest parade is unknown to me, but I can confirm that took place in Texas.

UPDATE: Further investigation (google!) indicates that these undead were marching in support of the first annual Dismember the Alamo Zombie Festival in Austin, Texas.

Chrome - Zombie Warfare (Can’t Let You Down) (buy)

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This Lumberjack is heading to the woods for a few days, posting will commence again upon return. While I’m on the road, please utilize this video clip to familiarize yourself with my kind:

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