ON THE PITCHFORK: Rilo Kiley announces its U.S. tour dates, with many cities where Pate fans live. That inludes Chicago, which apparently will host Lollapalooza as a stationary festival July 23-24. Some of the rumored acts look interesting.
CROOKED FINGERS: Eric Bachmann (formerly of Archers of Loaf) talks to NewCity Chicago magazine about Crooked Fingers' new record, Dignity and Shame.
THE KILLERS break bad on The Bravery. Coolfer hopes that Pitchfork breaks as bad on the Bravery as their reviewer does in a brutal review of the new Louis XIV disc. The Killers' Brandon Flowers also revealing that the band’s old drummer is now suing him over credit for “Mr. Brightside.”
BRIGHT EYES: Conor Oberst has definitely arrived: he's mocked in The Onion.
DAVID BYRNE talked to Xeni Jardin about downloading his music and his new streaming radio station.
THAT UBER-TRIPPY BURGER KING AD? Someone likes it way too much.
GOOD NEWS, PARENTS! Your kids aren't as drunk or crooked as you were. Faint praise, I know.
LATE EASTER NEWS: A free Easter dinner for the poor at Gus's World Famous Chicken in downtown Memphis turned into a food fight.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Page Six lifts some nasty stuff from US Weekly about Mr. Britney and an escort in Vegas. Coincidentally, Britney recently called US Weekly publisher Jann Wenner a “big old fat man.” Just saying.
THE OLSEN TWINS are selling their $7.3 million, 6,000-square-foot West Village penthouse, having never moved into it. If they are staying enrolled at NYU, might I suggest a class in money management?
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS get a good write-up for their Austin gig in the UT's Daily Texan.
BECK: The Mpls. City Pages calls his newly-released Guero his best yet (in the headline, anyway). FWIW, Rolling Stone gives it four stars.
POP CRITICISM AND CRED IN THE ERA OF BLOGS: The panel discussion on this topic I noted recently is sorta blogged by Brooklyn Vegan. Why am I not surprised that Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis says he doesn't read Pitchfork? And do I believe him?
CHRISTIAN ROCK: Christopher Ashley writes in the Yale Daily News that Christian rock is becoming more insular, while noting that some Christian musicians, such as U2 and Sufjan Stevens, are making a difference in the general marketplace.
GOSPEL MUSIC: George Washington Phillips was one of the founding fathers of American gospel music. He might be the yin to the yang of Robert Johnson. The Tofu Hut has one of his 18 songs as a download at presstime.
BRAD BIRD, director of The Incredibles (and voice of Edna Mode) is interviewed by ReadyMade magazine. The guy sent his first animated movie to Walt Disney Studios when he was eleven years old.
COURTNEY LOVE will play Linda Lovelace in an upcoming biopic. She's already played Larry Flynt's wife, but will this new movie show Lovelace as the anti-porn crusader she later became?
THE HUFFINGTON REPORT: Political gadfly and lost Gabor sister Arianna Huffington is launching a culture and politics webzine in the mold of Salon or Slate, with a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite, including (but not limited to): Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown.
NANOTECH: The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (as opposed to the Center for Irresponsible Nanotechnology) blogs a study in which it was involved called, “Potential Environmental Pollution and Health Hazards Resulting from Possible Military Uses of Nanotechnology.” I'm contingently concerned. Maybe.
THE FEYNMAN-TUFTE PRINCIPLE: A visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: Lurch, the Watusi steer, with record-setting horns. There are more pics if you follow the link.
TOO MANY ELEPHANTS: Elephants aren't hard to spot in South Africa's premier wildlife park these days; since park officials stopped culling elephants in 1994 under pressure from international animal-welfare groups, the elephants' numbers have ballooned from about 7,500 –widely considered a sustainable population for the park — to nearly 13,000. The officials face a dilemma: Leave the elephants alone, keep the tourists happy and risk the destruction of the park, or return to slaughtering elephants and risk damaging the park's international reputation and driving away visitors.
THE FUR IS FLYING: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claims that Jennifer Lopez forced Billboard magazine to remove an ad that blasted her for wearing fur.
IRAQ: The Abrams tank is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents, but the Army has an upgrade called the Tank Urban Survival Kit. Extra armor ought to help tanks, but it should be noted that the rate of fatal vehicle accidents, mostly rollovers involving armored Hummers, doubled in the past four months, as troops in Iraq had not been trained on them. That's a story those who complained about unarmored Hummers glossed over. Maybe it will be in Steven Bochco's new TV drama, Over There, scheduled to air on the FX Channel in July.
AL-QAEDA AND ARYAN NATION: Like two peas in a pod, according to August Kreis, résumé includes stops at some of America's nastiest extremist groups — Posse Comitatus, the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation. Kreis wants to make common cause with al Qaeda because, he says, they share the same enemies: Jews and the American government.
SIN CITY: Film Jerk says Sin City “is a highly specialized product for a very specific audience,” but “a memorable, disturbing triumph.” The reviewer from Seattle Weekly writes: “For those who demand strict fidelity to their comics, Sin City is a purist's film, bold and audacious. It doesn't let in outsiders willingly, and those who come had better be well armed.” According to York University's Excalibur, “The stories are well thought out and often surprising, but it is the execution of the visuals that makes this movie truly remarkable.”
INTELLECTUAL MARIJUANA: An article reprinted from the Toronto Star takes a look at intellectuals' reaction to comics over the years.
LIFE IMITATES FRIENDS: Four male models who appeared in an ad campaign against domestic violence are suing New York City, saying the posters stayed up beyond the agreed time, leading people to think they really were wife beaters.
LA VIDA ROBOT: Wired magazine has the story of how four illegal immigrants from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship.
ZIMBABWE: The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, the party of President Robert Mugabe, announced that only their supporters were eligible for food delivered to drought-stricken areas. But this year, the threat of starvation is creating a potentially potent backlash against ZANU-PF. Indeed, opposition members and diplomats are hopeful that, win or lose, the election will hasten the end of the Mugabe regime.
CULT OF THE iPod: Podcasting News ranks the Top 25 podcasts by hits. At presstime, the most popular is science news offered by NASA.
FILESHARING: The Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Grokster case have been blogged by a lawyer for the Media Access Project, stating “this is probably the only place you will see someone say that Justice Rehnquist now sounds like a bad combination of Darth Vader and the Emperor from Return of the Jedi…”
JUICED BASEBALL: At Baseball Musings, David Pinto notes that Major League Baseball's medical adviser, Dr. Elliot Pellman, who testified before the House committee examining the steroids issue two weeks ago, had some problems with his résumé. Oops!
NEW FACES YOU WILL BE SEEING A LOT IN 2006: Beginning next year, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading. Poynter has the pics from Microsoft's promotional booklet, “Now Read This.”
