Saturday is for Rumors

Headline News

Jennifer Love Hewitt is considering posing nude for Playboy. "She told me that maybe a sexy magazine layout with her showing her assets might give her a little edgier image and she might be considered for a femme fatale role.

She knows she can pull it off, but she thinks casting directors aren't so sure," said a friend of Hewitt's. And if you don't understand why this is Headline News here at Veritas Lux Mea, you obviously aren't a golfer. And if you don't understand that movie reference, you obviously aren't a Big Lebowski fan.


Daily Links

• Michael Berube discusses music in his latest post.
• Just when things were starting to roll along nicely in my fantasy basketball league, Gerald Wallace goes down with knee injury. With Marcus Camby still sidelined on my bench, it's going to be hard for me to reserve two roster spots for injured players, but I can't let go of Wallace can I? I guess it all depends on how serious the injury turns out to be, but right now I'm thinking, shit, there goes the neighborhood.
• Patriot Search, a sarcastic but clever response to the government trying to acquire Google's search records.
• New York moves to limit colleges that seek profits and offer "quick career training to poorly educated students." Don't misunderstand this: ALL colleges are seeking a profit, but New York (and many other states) are trying to move against those colleges that offer college courses in an empty room in a mall with a "professor" who probably only has their B.A. and teaches out of "Buisness Administration for Dummies."
• A man found dead on a NYC subway car may have been dead for hours before anyone noticed, reports Local6.com. Is it just me or was that something Tom Cruise's character Vincent in Collateral mentions? Weird.
• On a related note, here's a link to some great NYC subway graffiti/art.
• Bin Laden boosts book sales for Washington historian William Blum.
• From the New York Times: Truth, fiction and the Rosenbergs.
• AOL Instant Messanger set to take on Myspace.
  

Guess That Ass Contest

Congrats to Janet of Out The Other who correctly guessed that yesterday's asses were none other than the Beckhams. And special thanks to Cindy of Rich Girls are Weeping for updating me that the song I had labeled "Narcocorrido" was actually "No Key, No Plan." Darned directories.

Guess That Ass #7:

Music

• K of Analog Giant, one of my new favorite stops, has some great Conan/Walker Texas Ranger clips, and some great political articles worth perusing as well.
  
• Motel de Moka has some music from miserable folks worth hearing.
• Ryan has some Artic Monkeys live for download.
• Head on over to My Yellow Country Teeth and say Happy Birthday to the two lads.
  

Featured Album: The Weakerthans Reconstruction Site

It's not the music that's the most notable aspect of Reconstruction Site, the third full length from sensitive Canadian rockers The Weakerthans: it's the album art, by fellow Winnipegian Marcel Dzama. His absurdist root-beer watercolors connect the quartet to an idiosyncratic landscape inhabited by reclining bears, drably dressed doppelgangers, and people in red without torsos; across the tan expanse, two inscrutable nurses and a guy in a bear suit observe this nap time-cum-mass suicide. Since the mid 90s, this punk-rock Joseph Cornell's tiny drawings of dancing trees, angry deer, fatuous alligators, bloody frogs, worrisome amputees, violent elves, and other damaged, often armed characters have accumulated like snow, forming an obsessive cosmology built upon dusty bookstore ephemera. Unfortunately, The Weakerthans' by-the-books music isn't nearly as captivating...

Continue reading the Pitchfork review...

"Manifest"
"The Reasons"
"Plea from a Cat Named Virtue"
"Reconstruction Site"
"Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call"
"Time's Arrow"

Featured Album: The Juan Maclean Less Than Human

John Maclean has long been DFA's secret weapon. The Rapture gives good face. James Murphy gives good copy. Delia and Gavin give good "oh, they're easily my favorite" hipster trump card. But Maclean is the most effective. If any DFA records come close to hands-aloft status, it's his "Give Me Every Little Thing" and "You Can't Have It Both Ways". They're, you know, house music. No need for any prefixes or suffixes.

Maclean's former band, Six Finger Satellite, were a bruising mixture of skinny tie and thick neck, mixed eye-meltingly loud by Murphy live, and all but blueprinting Les Savy Fav (who I like better, but why lie?) on record. Which might explain why his dance music is so muscular (have you listened to those early Rapture EP's lately?), but it does make Less Than Human, a good chunk of which could be described as "gentle" or at least "pretty", a bit surprising. It's not quite the masterpiece everyone (at least me) was hoping for (the exclusion of "You Can't Have It Both Ways", for example, should be punishable Midnight Express-style) but it does deliver on the hype, which in 2005 is almost the same thing...

Continue reading the Pitchfork review...

"Give Me Everything"
"Shining Skinned Friend"
"Love is in the Air"
"In the Afternoon"
"My Time is Running Out"


Bonus mp3:
The Killers - "The Battle of Michael Valentine"