Paranoia runs deep into your life it will creep


Music producer Phil Spector is shown in Superior Court judge Monday, May 23, 2005, in Los Angeles. A judge said Monday, he will allow four of 10 incidents of evidence in Spector's murder trial that prosecutors say illustrate the music producer's history of pulling guns on women. Spector is on trial for the Feb. 23, 2003, fatal shooting of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson.

* ClusterfuckNation. excerpt:

"We now face the Memorial Day weekend, traditionally the start of the summer motoring season, when upward pressure on oil prices tends to resume. Even if the tanks are full now, it pays to remind ourselves that nearly three-quarters of that gasoline comes from other lands, including lands full of people who don't want us to be happy. One of these, arguably, is Iran -- though many in the hairsplitting game would say it's only the leaders who hate us, not the youthful masses of the population, who don't remember the Shah and all that. Some months ago, our leaders said they would not tolerate a nuclear Iran. In reply, Iran told the US to, well, to go piss up a rope, so to speak. All has been quiet since that exchange. They've made it pretty plain what they aim to do. Who knows what we aim to do? But paranoia runs deep."

* From the June 2005 Harper's Index:

-- Annual cost of all 16 U.N. peacekeeping mission currently underway: $3,870,000,000

-- Monthly cost of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: $4,100,000,000

-- Revenue from Iraqi oil sales that the CPA could not account for, according to a 2005 audit: $8,800,000,000

-- Number of federal benefits in the U.S. that are tied directly with marriage: 1,138

-- Amount for which George W. Bush successfully sued Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 1999: $2,500

* "I was drawing long before I was able to play music. I could do a passable drawing of a helicopter exploding or Jesus with a gun while I was still hitting my grandma's piano like an angry penguin, wondering why the result didn't sound like "She Loves You." Come adolescence, all my characters replaced the weapons in their hands with guitars. ...For the last 30 years I've thought of myself as a musician; but whenever the guitar (or my grandma's piano, now downstairs) has nothing new to show me, I pull out the pencil, the canvas and the brush, to see what comes. It's a truism to say that art and music are related; like saying Australia is near New Zealand." -- Robyn Hitchcock [via]

* Pitchfork writes in todays review of Malkmus' Face the Truth that "Face the Truth is SM's third solo album and his first to hold the line against the work of Pavement and Silver Jews, the regrettably short-lived side project with D.C. Berman."

How uninformed can a music magazine be. Don't answer.

Well, the Jews live on, and have an album out in October.

In fact, Berman has said: "as long as two of us walk the earth the band is still together. and, as always, thanks to you that give a damn about what we do."