The Chicago Sun-Times finds out why the Old 97’s are so fond of the Windy City. I find the fact that Rhett Miller is only eight months older than me troubling for some reason. I had thought he was older. From LHB.

Billboard reports that the CD and DVD culled from last year’s Tell Us The Truth tour will be coming out October 5 and 19, respectively. Featuring performances from the likes of Steve Earle and Billy Bragg, the tour was held to raise awareness on issues of media consolidation, freedom of the press and just generally bring attention to the fact that some really underhanded shit was going on amongst the power brokers of America. A noble cause, but it’s disheartening to look around and see that things are just as bad if not worse than they were a year ago.

Things are getting freaked out and loud at the El Mocambo on November 3 with Dead Meadow and The Warlocks.

So you may have noticed the appearance of a none-too-subtle “Top 5 Picks” banner thingee off to the side there sponsored by the good people at Filter magazine. Why is it there? Simple – they offered me stuff, I chose to accept their stuff and I am now part of their “Filter Music Alliance”. I hope we get decoder rings. As for the banner, I find it fairly unobtrusive and it even matches my site colours. Plus, I genuinely like their magazine. And for anyone who’s going to start crying, “sell out!”, I say to you – you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I say that partly in jest and partly not. Running this site isn’t without overhead costs, and while I could certainly eat them all without it really affecting my personal budget, if I can subsidize it in some part I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t. Maybe I’ll set up some of those Google adwords things. Does anyone really make any money off of running those things on their site? But in all seriousness, nothing you may see showing up over the next little while will have any effect on the editorial content of the site. Hell, I don’t even really know where I’m going with this thing. Sufficed to say, there’s some changes afoot, but I will announce each one as I go just because I feel it’s appropriate somehow. And for those of you who only read this site through my RSS feed, you probably won’t notice a blessed thing.

Part and parcel with these ‘changes’ will be a long-overdue site redesign. I intended to set up a development site on my local computer but for whatever reason, my install of Apache no longer seems to work. If I try to open up a PHP page even with everything running, it doesn’t recognize it as a web page and it asks me where I want to save the file – not a good development. I swear my server install worked fine the last time I used it several months ago. I don’t really know how any of this stuff works, so I’m probably going to have to call in professional help before I can move forward… VIC! Get your ass over here. Never mind, I’m an idiot. Localhost. Yeesh.

Oh, and on the topic of selling out – if you’ve never read Yo La Tengo’s stories about providing the music for a cellphone commercial and a no-smoking PSA, you should. Mp3s and everything!

So you know how my bike got a flat tire a couple weeks ago? Turns out it wasn’t just an accident. When I went to get my brake cable replaced yesterday, the repair guy noticed that my front inner tube was bulging out of the tire on account of a long, perfectly straight slash across the tire. I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before, though it does explain why when I pulled the old inner tube, the point of puncture was also a long straight tear across the width of the thing. Some asshole actually slashed my tires, but did such a lame job of it that the thing didn’t burst for Lord knows how long. Who goes around slashing peoples’ bike tires? I swear to God, sometimes I just hate people.

np – Lucinda Williams / Essence

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.