While you’re waiting for the new Magnetic Fields album, watch Stephin Merritt write a song for NPR’s Project Song. Once you’ve done enough gazing-in-awe, you can download an MP3 of the song alone here.

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It recently occurred to me, while playing some Soul Coughing for a friend who’d been on a weird music hiatus during the late 90s, that many of the band’s best tracks are currently either totally impossible to (legally) get hold of, or scattered across various soundtracks. Notwithstanding the much-appreciated inclusion of “Buddha Rhubarb Butter” and […]

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Brian Doherty finds a hilarious compilation. Seriously, I lost track of the number of times I laughed out loud. I think this might be amusing even for non–comics geeks, but if (like me) you recall with a kind of stunned incredulity the insane period in the 90s when this guy was considered one of the […]

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I chat with author and comics critic Douglas Wolk about some of the themes raised in the recent World War Hulk crossover.

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Doubtless this clip will be pulled shortly, but even by the standards of The Simpsons, this scene guest-starring comics legends Alan Moore, Dan Clowes, and Art Spiegelman is genius.

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Apologies for light blogging; your humble author is sick with whatever’s going around the DC folk. As a consolation prize, listen to the first track off the forthcoming Magnetic Fields album Distortion: “Three-Way.”

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It’s probably pointless to link to specific clever strips of the geektastic Web comic xkcd—it’d be easier to just add a feed posting each day’s strip automatically—but since I’ve got comics on the brain, I figured I’d note that this recent strip is a clever mini-commentary on the way the medium depicts time spatially, a […]

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A few weeks ago, my regular pub trivia team took over the rotating hosting duties at our weekly game at Wonderland. Teammate and Reasonoid Dave Weigel and I decided to close with an audio round, split into two parts: Dave did five questions about his beloved mash-ups, and I did five about 20th century composers, […]

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To my eternal shock, someone is actually paying attention to my sporadic posts about music scattered among the Very Serious political commentary: Music blogger Lumberjack Thief quizzed me about my musical proclivities and then assembled an excellent mix for an occasional series about the sonic preferences of DC wonks. If nothing else, check it out […]

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Apart from being enormous fun on their own, Halloween parties always provide a little snapshot of the Zeitgeist by way of the costumes chosen. A few themes jumped out at me from this weekend’s shindig. Superheroes and comics characters are always popular, but I did notice that this year they were almost all Marvel characters: […]

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