I’m not quite sure how I feel about this video, but I know I love the song:

Matthew Sweet - Magnet And Steel (Walter Egan Cover) (buy)

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We have special correspondence today with Lumberjack Thief’s special consciousness correspondent Kevin Cain.

Kevo writes in from Buffalo, New York, beckoning us to the woods soon:

born on the forgotten
moments of the new moon
your first cry echoes
in the star filled sky
calling the ancient
time distorted light
for meaning
for direction.
Orion draws his bow
the slick point of his arrow
pierces the shadowy night
and the unanswered futures.
you fall silent
into your mother’s grassy arms
awaiting the arrow’s curve
and the coming of the full moon.

Kevin’s poem arrived via Gmail. It was accompanied by this Google ad, asking a question we all must ask of ourselves at one point or another:

Fred Neil - The Other Side Of This Life (Unreleased Take) (buy)

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It has to me admitted. I am now an official fan of New York Magazine after having read two of this week’s feature items — Everybody Sucks and The Making Of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I don’t know exactly why, but for a nominally pigeonholed magazine, they produce some good shit.

If you read the Gawker piece, you may learn that Jimmy Kimmel was pretty much justified in raking Emily Gould over the coals on CNN:

If you read the Obama/Clinton article, you will come to know that Hillary’s high school nickname was Sister Frigidaire.

Their profile of link pimp Matt Drudge is also illuminating, revealing a man who guards his privacy with a paranoid mind while destroying the privacy of others.

Ace Frehley - New York Groove (Russ Ballard Cover) (buy)

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It’s little known to some, but Annie Schutte, the head of the online editorial team at the Center for American Progress, is also the D.C. correspondent for “cutting edge” “culture blog” CultureBlog.

In a past work life, she edited iris magazine, a national feminist magazine for progressive young women. She also rules at Photo Hunt and mapping global emissions.

(Photo by A.Pratt)

1) What is the first website (other than your own or email) that you visit in the morning? I’m a bit of a workaholic, so I usually just turn my computer on and start working. But once i get around to not working on my work website, I suppose its usually either The Washington Post, wikipedia, or popsugar.

2) What is the most interesting bit of information that you’ve picked up in the past month? If you’re a female trolling for men on dating websites, being blond counts as the equivalent of four years of college. As in, you can be blond and have a high school diploma and get asked out as much as a brunette with a college degree.

3) How would you describe your taste/interest in music? I guess I know it when i hear it. My “rainy day” mixes tend to get more play than anything else if that gives you any idea, but genres range from rock-ish to soul to folk. i also have a penchant for listening to recordings of live shows.

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

1) Over My Shoulder, Jayhawks
2) Throback, Brazos
3) Polar Opposites (Modest Mouse Cover), Iron Horse
4) Margaret vs. Pauline, Neko Case
5) Grace Kelly, Mika
6) Merry Happy, Kate Nash

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

1) Joni Mitchell, Blue
2) 69 Love Songs, Magnetic Fields
3) Biograph, Bob Dylan (This is the only set besides Bootlegs that has “I’ll Keep it With Mine” on it, so I have no choice.)
4) Greatest Hits, Tupac (For those of you who love Tupac, you know that choosing this greatest hits album isn’t a cop out, because it includes the previously unreleased track “Changes.”)
5) Greatest Hits, Al Green (OK. This actually is a cop out, but I can’t choose.)

6) What are some songs to which you have a particular emotional attachment? Hmm…definitely Billie Holiday singing “My Man,” and probably the entire album Music Box by Mariah Carey (7th grade was tough).

7) How did you first get interested in music and how has your taste developed since then? I went through a serious Moody Blues and Beach Boys phase during the early elementary school years under the influence of my parents and listened to “Knights in White Satin” an embarrassing number of times. This was logically followed by about a year of listening to “Hotel California” and “American Pie on repeat, something that to this day I’m not sure was driven by the songs themselves or fascination with the length and narrative structure. My first legitimate forays into music began in late elementary school and middle school when my best friend and I began buying TLC and Michael Jackson cassette singles and choreographing intricate performances to accompany “What Has He Done for You Lately” off of Rhythm Nation—an album that was pretty much our oracle of knowledge and confidence for many years. Like many American pre-teens, this soon led to joining the music clubs advertised on the back of Parade in the Sunday paper and then with the dawn of Napster, downloading and listening to copious amount of random shit. Somewhere in all that I realized that I hate the Eagles almost as much as I hate Jimmy Buffet, and while I still love early rock, r&b, etc, I prefer quieter music a lot of the time, and people with more musical talent.

8) What are some of your musical guilty pleasures? 90s pseudo-rock like Semisonic and Better than Ezra.

9) If you were running for President in 2008, what song would you use as your campaign theme? Tupac’s Changes, although that probably wouldn’t get me elected for reasons iterated in the song. Maybe Revolution by the Beatles, although you’d never get the rights to that

10) What is your opinion on downloading copyrighted material without paying for it? I never buy music. I do pay for concerts, though. Is torrenting technically even illegal?

Here are some songs I hope she’ll like.

1) Denny Doherty - Tuesday Morning (buy)
2) Sneakers - Sil Vous Plait (buy)
3) White Magic - Keeping The Wolves From The Door (buy)
4) X-Ray Spex - Germ Free Adolescents (buy)
5) Bobby Hebb - Sunny (buy)
6) Neil Young - Only Love Can Break Your Heart (London 2-7-71) (info)
7) The Olivia Tremor Control - No Growing (Exegesis) (buy)
8) The Sunshine Fix - Last Night I Had A Dream (Said I Had A Dream Last Night) (buy)
9) Weird Sisters - This Is The Night (buy)
10) Gza - Liquid Swords (buy)
11) Bert Jansch & John Renbourn - No Exit (buy)
12) Robyn Hitchcock - Sometimes A Blond (buy)
13) Bonnie “Prince” Billy - No More Workhorse Blues (buy)
14) Silver Jews - Long Long Gone (buy)
15) Ugly Casanova - Hotcha Girls (buy)
16) Matthew’s Celebrity Pixies Tribute - Hey (Pixies Cover) (info)
17) The Monkees - Ditty Diego War Chant (buy)
18) Beulah - Popular Mechanics For Lovers (buy)
19) The Detroit Cobras - Weak Spot (buy)
20) Bobby Bare - Fellow Travelers (buy)
21) Dipstick - These Days (Jackson Browne Cover) (buy)

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Yesterday, I mentioned Maurice Binder, the man who designed the opening credits sequence for 14 of the first 16 James Bond movies. As Charles Taylor (not the war criminal) wrote for Salon, “Binder’s work was proof that squares could get a kick out of psychedelia, too.”

Now, I knew that he had done non-Bond work, but had never explored it until last night, when, thanks to the YouTube, I happen to come upon three dazzling Binder sequences that y’all must check out for yourselves:

Camper Van Beethoven - Opening Theme (buy)

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Big news broke yesterday. White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto confirmed that he will be purchasing the new Radiohead album, saying he’s “a big fan of Thom Yorke and the boys.” Fratto did not comment on how he intended to obtain it.

A few keen fans are complaining about the particulars of the experiment and free-ish download. Some are even saying they’re feeling “duped” by a digital conspiracy:

The first bone of contention arose October 9 — the day before Rainbows became available for download — when fans who ordered the album (either in its download-only form or as a deluxe, $81 “discbox” version) received an e-mail from Radiohead’s official online store, announcing that “the album [would] come as a 48.4 MB ZIP file containing 10 x 160 [kilobits per second], DRM-free MP3s.” […]

First and foremost, all of Radiohead’s previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second — the highest-possible compression rate in the format (though still not nearing the quality of a compact disc) — and most file-sharers scoff at anything less than 192 kbps. (MP3 files encoded with a lower bit rate will generally play back at a lower quality — something not readily apparent on tiny iPod earbuds but obvious enough on high-end home stereos.)

Second, most took issue with when Radiohead chose to announce that In Rainbows would be available at 160 kbps — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download. To be fair, however, the band did give potential customers the power of choosing how much they wanted to pay to download the album. It could be had for as little as the transaction fee of 45 pence, or roughly 92 cents. There was also an option on the Web site to cancel orders; though, given the timing of the bit-rate announcement, fans had less than 24 hours to do so.

“Most promo MP3s come at a higher bit rate,” wrote the author of U.K. blog Kids Pushing Kids. “Worst pound and pence I’ve ever spent.”

“Radiohead has such delicate music that requires detail and depth of sound. … I for one CAN tell the difference between 160 and 192,” responded one commenter. “[With] 160 you can’t hear the finer details that make Radiohead so great. I have lost a bit of respect for Radiohead for this. I would never make people pay for 160. They may as well just stream stuff off MySpace.”

Some are also pissed off that the Radiohead camp may actually have a strategy to turn a profit with their release.

I haven’t chosen how I’m going to obtain it yet either.

Radiohead - Nobody Does It Better (Carly Simon Cover)

Could Maurice Binder be better?

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Ok. So y’all know about Cyndi Lauper, right? Ms. Time after Time in all her glory (which, FYI, is not my least favorite song, whatever Malkmus may say).

Well, what I didn’t know until a recent Totally Fuzzy run is that Cyndi had a band before her Goonie fame, in which she sang songs that would have been appropriate during Back To The Future’s Enchantment Under The Sea dance:

Her band, Blue Angel, only recorded one album before she headed off to sing songs about masturbation as a major 80’s solo star.

Blue Angel - Late (buy)

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We’re going simple simple simple today. Tullycraft is a band who wears their record collector geekdom, plus a fair share of indie snobbery, on their lyrical sleeves. They’re quite endearing for those who might rely on mix tapes for emotional communication.

As they would gleefully tell you, the most accurate term for their sound would probably be twee. They even have their own MP3 blog. I like a lot of what I’ve downloaded from them.

Tullycraft - Twee (buy)
Tullycraft - Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid To Know About (buy)

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So, y’all know Charlie Savage, right? He’s the Boston Globe reporter who busted open the story of the Bush Administration’s use of signing statements to skirt and nullify laws passed by Congress. His efforts even won him a Pulitzer.

What you may not know about Savage is that he broke an even bigger story earlier in his career. In 1995, Savage, then a just a mild-mannered journalists working for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, was the first mainstream news writer to report that one could sync Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard of Oz, which Savage described at the time as escaping “logic or understanding.”

Savage was asked about his blockbuster scoop, which he picked up from a Pink Floyd usenet forum, by the DC branch of The Onion…but they didn’t post it online, so I can’t block quote it for you. I may transcribe it soon though.

In the meantime, watch the first part of Dark Side of the Rainbow:

The Flaming Lips - Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pink Floyd Cover Live On KCRW)

(Yes, I know this song’s not on Dark Side, but Coyne talks about Oz, so deal with it.)

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Eels were my second big, post-911 band obsession. The first was a knee jerk return to Nirvana, but Eels were the one that ultimately got me through. During that time of confusion and feeling, Electro Shock Blues was a very important album for me.

As has been indicated before, the album left quite a mark on me. With its theme of coming out alive on the other end of someone else’s death, Blues very aurally demonstrates that pain doesn’t have to last forever. In paticular, the terminal track, P.S. You Rock My World, floods with optimism and hope. Ben Woolhead described the song well in 2003:

The only genuine moment of respite comes with the final track ‘PS You Rock My World’ and its insistence that however much you lose, you always have something to cling onto. It sounds an incongruous yet defiantly affirmative note at the end of the album’s funereal march, as if E the church organist has suddenly broken into Monty Python’s ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’. It makes the experience of listening to Electro-Shock Blues akin to being slowly buried alive only to have the lid of the coffin pried open at the very last moment.

Eels - P.S. You Rock My World (buy)

I have this man to thank for introducing me to Butch & E:

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