Friday!

!!! Dinosaur Jr. !!!

Our Lady of Bells

T-Bone Burnett

Under Byen

and Under Byen again

Carl Orff

Pedro the Lion

Sasha Frere-Jones' article in latest New Yorker on America and Brit-pop, their similiarites, differences, and how they influence each other. Here's a quote:

Americans are comfortable with certain kinds of moral ambiguity—hard rock and hip-hop are full of harsh conclusions and unpleasant world views—but we prefer our British bands to be picker-uppers.

Huh? In any case it's an interesting read, and though I disagree with some of it I don't disagree enough to rebut. Here's an interview with Frere-Jones about the article.

A great story on yesterday's All Things Considered on Ralph Epperson who started doing radio the right way in 1948 and was doing it right up until his death early this past May. When asked why his radio station did what it did he said (I'm paraphrasing) "if there are 25 stations all doing the same thing, why start a 26th." Word that, something I'm going to think about this weekend. Check out the music on the link too.

And go read

I never cared for minimalism, never cared for Raymond Carver or Bobbie Ann Mason or Ann Beattie or the whole Iowa School, but there are two, the late Breece Pancake and the still wonderful Amy Hempel, who made miniaturism work as it should: making mysterious and uncanny and large the small. "I leave out a lot when I tell the truth," says the narrator of "The Harvest," perhaps Hempel's most famous story (itself a brilliant deconstruction of the minimalist trend). As a reader, I want to be swerved, and Hempel swerves me almost every story.